Subject: Re: SVG and compound images
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Fri May 04 2001 - 08:07:41 CDT
At 10:34 AM 5/4/2001 +0100, F J Franklin wrote:
>Hi, I'm currently working on WMF -> SVG translation as part of libwmf2.
Have you talked with Bob Friesenhahn
(<mailto:bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us>) from the ImageMagick team? Bob has
already been working with Dom on this and has such functionality already
integrated into IM.
>To view SVG I can use the JAVA-based svgtoolkit,
I wouldn't recommend this as client-side Java is a mess and isn't
guaranteed on all our platform.
>sodipodi is coming along nicely and can be used to edit as well as create
>SVG images, and has recently begun collecting clipart.
It's also GNOME specific, which doesn't help our other
platforms. This, however, will be a nice option once Bonobo support is added.
>I have no experience with librsvg but it looks to be very GNOME.
I ported librsvg (or portions thereof) to Mac OS and Windows. I
had to bring a small portion of glib with me, but it's not much more than
Abi already carries. HOWEVER, librsvg supports a VERY small portion of the
SVG spec.
>And I have no experience with Adobe's SVG plugin.
It's only available for Mac OS and Windows, and only embeddable on
Windows.
You missed a big choice - ImageMagick!! It already includes a
good implementation of SVG, supports reading in WMF files (and outputting
as SVG, or just rendering them) and is open source.
>(2) Images
>
>WMF files can contain raster and/or vector graphics. If the metafile
>describes a single raster image then WMF -> PNG would be the sensible
>translation; similarly, if the image contains no raster images (i.e.,
>vector graphics only) then WMF -> SVG is trivial.
Agreed.
>The difficulty arises when (a) there are multiple raster images; and/or
>(b) there is a mixture of raster and vector graphics.
Why is that a problem? SVG fully supports raster images - either
inline or external.
>Assuming, therefore, for the moment, that the image has multiple raster
>graphics as well as vector graphics. SVG can describe all this, but the
>raster images are separate and referred to by URL.
Not necessarily. SVG also provides for inline images, and in fact
some authoring applications (Adobe Illustrator) default to writing raster
image data that way.
>As such, importing a `single' SVG image into AbiWord would entail
>importing multiple secondary images (some of which, for the general
>non-WMF case, may even have hyperlinks to images on the web)
Correct.
Leonard
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat May 26 2001 - 03:51:02 CDT