Subject: Re: Topic: Clipart and 1.0
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Thu May 03 2001 - 18:03:58 CDT
At 10:58 PM 5/1/01 -0400, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>Clipart is really cool :) And I just happen to know where we can go grab a
>bunch (the guy who did sketch did a bunch for Gnome and wants it to go into
>Gnome-Office).
>
>For some examples, go:
>http://www.linuxgraphic.org/section2d/sketch/cliparts/index.html
Those are *quite* snazzy. Any time we can include well-executed eye candy,
that makes users really happy.
>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
The net effect is to maximize the quality of the resulting artwork in your
documents. Thus, over the long term, I think it's pretty clear that most
(if not all) clipart should be shipped as SVG, rather than PNG.
Fortunately, the artwork on that site *was* created in a vector format, and
it looks like that software has SVG export capabilities. Unfortunately, we
haven't sorted out our vector image strategy yet.
Thus, the 1.0 clipart question could conceivably be answered in at least
three ways:
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 not familiar enough with ImageMagick's (or mini-IM's) support to know
how late in the rendering chain their rasterization of vector content
happens. Ideally, I'm assuming that SVGs wouldn't be rasterized at all, but
converted directly to postscript so they can be rasterized at device
resolution by the device.
If anyone's ready to discuss these (and other) SVG issues, please fork a new
top-level topic to do so.
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.
By now, I think everyone's familiar with my default preference is when faced
with that kind of choice (Just Works vs. nothing at all). However, just to
make sure, I'll spawn a new top-level topic to discuss it. ;-)
Paul
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