Subject: Re: Topic: Clipart and 1.0
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 20:07:05 CDT
Hi Paul,
>Those are *quite* snazzy. Any time we can include well-executed eye candy,
>that makes users really happy.
Yup, that's the idea :)
> >All we'd really need is a pretty dialog and to ship these files (probably
> >converted to PNG).
>
>I think we need a bit more than that.
>
>I've never used much clipart in other products, but my impression is that
>most such content is done as vector graphics. This has a number of
>advantages:
>
> - that's how the artists drew it
> - the images are often smaller
> - printing is resolution-independent
> - so is scaling
You're right on all counts here. They're in Sketch's native format, which we
should be able to convert to SVG quite easily. They *should* be vector
graphics, but the $64,000 question is "who is going to actually code a SVG
rasterizer?"
Now, there is some support already done here by Raph, et. al. in librsvg
(see gnome's cvs), but we'll need to port this elsewhere and certainly will
need to improve it, should we choose to go this route. This code is
embryonic.
Now, my advocacy for PNG is really simple: SVG simply doesn't work. You go
off all the time on how features should just work, and work right, etc...
But having SVG in our Import->Graphic dialog is *really really really* bad
for a few reasons:
1) We can't display SVGs
2) We have trouble reloading SVGs (or docs with embedded SVG data)
3) No one has touched this code in ages, and it's not to that happy fuzzy
mature state where you can just leave it alone to gracefully acquire
bit-rot.
So I'm taking out SVG from the NON-DEBUG version of Abi. No one gets to
argue here without providing code to correct *all 3* of my above problems.
There will be no discussion here.
>1. Just ship rasterized PNGs.
>2. Omit from 1.0, and wait for SVG support.
>3. Hold 1.0 until SVG Just Works.
I'm going for #1 now. Once the above SVG problem has been taken care of, it
will be absolutely *trivial* to make the switch.
>Failing that, I think we're faced with a choice between:
>
> #1 ... which doesn't Just Work, and
> #2 ... which doesn't have the feature at all.
This isn't one of those situations. We want eye-candy for users to see and
click on. Users don't care about any of the details so long as they get
pretty pictures in their document that they can resize. All the rest is just
petty implementation details.
Dom
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat May 26 2001 - 03:51:01 CDT