Subject: Re: Topic: Clipart and 1.0
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Fri May 04 2001 - 16:07:08 CDT
At 09:07 PM 5/3/01 -0400, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>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.
Actually, I think Sketch may be able to save as SVG. If so, that'd be less
work.
>They *should* be vector
>graphics, but the $64,000 question is "who is going to actually code a SVG
>rasterizer?"
Bingo. I'll fork that portion of the discussion into an "SVG and 1.0" topic
in a minute.
>>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.
Oh, it *is* one of those situations, but otherwise I agree with you. Clip
art is so cool that people will probably forgive us if it looks crappy when
they resize or print it.
The only way to have high-quality WYSIWYG clipart is via vector images.
Resizing raster images is an inherently messy process. Even if you don't
resize them manually, your output still isn't likely to be WYSIWYG, unless
you have either:
- a very low-resolution printer, or
- a very high-resolution screen.
Otherwise, one or the other has to be scaled, so it'll only look good in at
most one of those places. (Which do we currently choose, BTW?)
If everyone's comfortable with the quality issue, then going with #1 is
fine.
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Sat May 26 2001 - 03:51:02 CDT