[Gridflow-dev] [PD] pd2png : screenshots of patchs

[s p]

> ps and pdf have been plenty portable since very long. The claim of higher
portability (« even more cross -platform » in your other mail) looks like
just another epistle

I never said anybody invented interoperability. PDF and PS are formats from
Adobe. Even though PDF is an open spec, Adobe still has some patents on it.
PS on the other hand is a very specific format that's almost not used
anywhere else than for printers.
SVG on the other hand is a developed by the W3C, which makes it a fully
open format, there's no part of it that belong to any private corporation.
It is understood by most of the image editors, and it is THE vector
graphics language for the web, which means that it will most probably
dominate the field in the future (I don't particularly like that, but it's
just a fact).

> The reason you pick one of the « vector » formats is because you want a
scalable picture, and the reason you pick one of the raster formats is
because you want to have it just like it is on screen.

The reason I pick SVG (not "one of" the vector formats) :

- it is not only an image format, but also a data container. In our case it
holds information about what's in your patch.
- it is stylable with CSS, so the content and the look are natively
separated
- it is widely supported, there is good libraries in many languages, so you
generate images very easily by using DOM manipulation libraries.


> There are plenty of image conversion tools from many formats to many
others

Good luck in trying a conversion tool raster -> vector that gives you
meaningful results. Doing it that way is basically just an ugly hack
As I said SVG is also a data container. A raster format holds no data
(apart from the pixel data of course). On the other hand SVG doesn't tell
what you image should look like, only what it should contain. In that sense
SVG is more central than a raster format.


2013/5/20 Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>

> Le 2013-05-15 à 18:46:00, s p a écrit :
>
>  Well ... basically to me the way to go is really with SVG as a starting
>> point. Because once you have SVG, you can use one of hundred different
>> tools to convert to PNG, JPG or any image format you can dream of.
>>
>
> Well, that's not a real reason. There are plenty of image conversion tools
> from many formats to many others. Several other formats were already
> convertible by hundreds of tools before svg existed.
>
> The reason you pick one of the « vector » formats is because you want a
> scalable picture, and the reason you pick one of the raster formats is
> because you want to have it just like it is on screen. In that sense,
> converting a patch directly to a vector format is not a « screenshot ».
>
> And within the vector formats, ps and pdf have been plenty portable since
> very long. The claim of higher portability (« even more cross-platform » in
> your other mail) looks like just another epistle from the Holy Church of
> XML, who talk like they invented interoperability and as if their formats
> were magically better at it.
>
>
>
> PS : I'm not replying on pd-list because I'm not subscribed.
>
>  ______________________________**______________________________**
> __________
> | Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC
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