Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

SVG Now a W3 Recommendation

Posted by michael on from the macromedia-trembling-in-boots dept.

Bob_Juanita writes: "The W3C has finally made the Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) format an official recommendation." I'm looking forward to this - SVG looks to have a lot of potential for web development. Easy, dynamic, scalable graphics from database data - nice.

2 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Tools? by crisco · · Score: 5, Informative
    On Windows? Tons of tools. On the high end, Adobe seems to be embracing SVG, possibly as something to break Macromedia's stranglehold on .swg. Their Illustrator has support for SVG and they are probably the ones doing the most to effectively promote the format by distributing a SVG viewer plugin with the Acrobat 5 reader. Corel Draw and even Macromedia's vector drawing tools also support SVG. Going a bit easier on the pocketbook, JASC software has done work on a tool to do SVG and I believe there is a very nice free tool to do at least basic vector drawings.

    On the Linux side of things, there is something called Sodipodi that has great promise as a SVG tool, unfortunately it isn't close to being done. Kontour has support for SVG. There are also a myriad of command line tools for conversion from other vector formats.

    Want links? start with the DMOZ category.

    --

    Bleh!

  2. Start SVGing! by Boiotos · · Score: 5, Informative

    Browsing SVG

    The only browser plug-in for SVG right now is Adobe's, and it only works in NS4 and IE5 for Mac and Win32. However, there is a rapidly-developing Win32 SVG-savy branch of Moz by Alex Fritz. No text support yet, alas, but the author suggests that it should be easy to port to other platforms.

    Generating SVG

    Sodipodi is a Win/Linux vector graphics program with SVG at its heart -- well worth a look. Sketch runs in Python and includes SVG in its import/export set. I've had good luck transforming complex Illustrator diagrams into SVG using Sketch.

    On the Win platform, I'm quite fond of Jasc WebDraw; it's in beta and a fully functional demo is provided.

    Finally, the versitility of the Batiklibrary is staggering. Written in Java, it includes a viewer, transcoders to png and jpg and a very cool Graphics2D implementation. The latter allows anything graphics that can be drawn to a java G2D panel to be instead output as SVG. This is a great way to get font dimension info for precision layout of SVG, as we've done building dynamic timelines at the Historical Event Markup Project.