svg

Created Thursday 15/12/2005

SVG is a scalable vector graphics format in xml. SVG is now being integrated into the gnome desktop and there's an interesting article on this at OS News. SVG is an xml format and allows scaling an image to pretty much an arbitrary size whilst maintaining sharp focus (unlike resizing a png or jpeg which starts to look grainy is enlarged too much). The SVG xml format is standardized by the W3M (see SVG Graphics standards)

1. SVG Editors and views

• gimp - can open an svg document. It seems to ask what size want and then creates an image from the doument.
• gill - Gnome's SVG viewer and editor.
• sodipodi - this is developed from gill and is a gnome vector drawing app. See Sodipodi project
• inkscape - this is developed from sodipodi and is a Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) based graphics editor. It includes alpha blending, node editing, SVG to PNG export. See inkscape.org

2. Batik

Batik is a java framework for manipulating svg documents. It's quite handy as it provides for easy (dynamic) conversion from an svg document into a png/jpeg/tiff IconImage (using the ImageTranscoders included in the distribution). See Batik (apache.org). See also the Transcoder API for examples of converting svg documents to jpg (called rasterising).

Stuart Moorfoot © 15 Dec 2005 foo@bund.com.au