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Re: Last Call: 'Proposed Experiment: Normative Formatin AdditiontoASCII Text' to Experimental RFC (draft-ash-alt-formats)

2006-06-16 14:35:40
On 16-jun-2006, at 22:57, Ted Faber wrote:

SVG is currently exportable into most major bitmap formats.
http://librsvg.sourceforge.net/ the converter is rsvg. Runs out of the
box on most free unices.

Of course, you can't go back from the bitmap to the vector, which is
exactly the point.

Right. And since most of us don't have native vector displays, you can't work directly with what you see, you need to go through a layer of software. When you're designing stuff that has to look pretty in print, such as logos, you'll want to use vector so you can use whatever native resolution you find on your way down the road. Figures in technical documents are a very different matter: there is no reason for making the pixels so small that you can't see them as individual pixels anymore. The opposite is true: if you make them nice and big you can make each and every one of them count, think MacPaint. Yes, this looks bad and backwards, but it's very easy to draw in the first place compared with the more advanced stuff, and this goes double for editing an existing image. With a 16 color 640x480 bitmap you can easily pick pieces up and move them somewhere else, and align them exactly. With vector graphics this is infinitely harder

Once you've sampled the image to put it in a bitmap
you've lost information.

You assume that there is information in the barely visible details. I hope this isn't true for the technical drawings you work with.

One of the complications with vector graphics is that you can scale them easily, but they're not usable at every scale. For instance, I regularly receive Visio documents where the text is SO small that I can't read it even if I make the picture fill my entire laptop screen. Apparently the person who created that image likes small fonts and has a very high resolution monitor. With bitmaps you can easily set a maximum size and whether text is readable is painfully obvious so this problem can't really happen.

But we are describing an *archival* format.  It's not important
that they be editable,

Yes, it is.

It's useful, but the primary issue is to be able to view them.  That's
what archival means.

JUST being abble to view them isn't good enough.

Even if you care about editing, it really depends on what kind of
editing you want to do.  Edge detection is not so easy in a vector
representation, but selecting a box or hunk of text is much easier.  I
think I'm much more likely to do the latter on an RFC document than the
former.

Well, if you like doing this in SVG or PDF, I have no problem with that. As long as the normative version is the simple version: ASCII for text, simple bitmap for images. Or even better: no images.

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