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Major Step Forward For SVG in the Desktop
Ur@eus writes "SVG the w3c format for Scalable Vector Graphics is seen as many as the future of desktop icons as it allows for scaling icons etc. without loss of quality. Dominic Lachowicz has been working hard on fixing bugs in librsvg over the last few days. The result is that librsvg now renders all available SVG icons perfectly.
Not only do it render them, but it renders them faster than libpng renders the same images in png format.
Together with the gdkpixbuf plugin librsvg offer it means GNOME 2.2 will be able to use SVG images not only for icons or desktop backgrounds, but also for the GUI widgets themselves and the graphics of the window manager.
Dom's announcement can be found on the librsvg mailinglist. The librsvg site also offer a GNOME 2.2 metatheme using mostly SVG icons including a nice screenshot."
Now, what is the problem with icons today??? They're ICONS. It's not like they're actual programs that matter! They're ICONS! C'mon!
This will pave the way for bigger and better OSX clones! Honestly, do we really need SVG icons on the desktop ? All i do is click my icons, i don't need them to enlarge to 200% when I mouse over them or shrink to nothing when I click them. I understand the need for eye candy, which is cool, but SVG icons aren't on the top of my list. Eye candy ? www.sh0t.com/gnome.jpg Anyhow, it's an advancement nonetheless
IF SVG supports raster (pixelbased) graphics, together with the vector graphics (as textures or something), this could be really useful. An ultimate graphics format, the holy grail...
As for not being needed on the desktop. Optimizations are *always* needed and useful. Also, this can finally mean truly resolution independent graphics. Simply know the dpi of your screen and all will always be the same size, independent of grannys old 640x480 and mine 1280x1024...
Great work librsvg team!!! I look forward to the day when there is no more Flash because SVG is so well supported. SVG: XML based, open standard, w3c backed, blah, blah. I love it! SVG is the ISH!
Why not? The scalable aspect means you would only have to supply one icon file for different resolutions. You could have applications where the proportions where exactly the same regardless of if the resolution was 800x600 or 1280x1024.
What about replacing flash animations in web sites with something really standard?
Even more so, using XML and SVG, it would be very easy to create additional icons without a lot of programming behind it. You may need to a SAX reader to take the stateful information into some form, but after that, it's just XSLT transformations into SVG, and voila, you have an easy way to make cool meters/icons.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
It would still be an improvement though.
My UID is prime!
Yupp, that's a problem. But if only small parts were textured (i.e. the parts that require it), you could use a higher resolution and still save space and performance.
gdkpixbuf
That looks like someone headbutted the keyboard...
However the entire quartz graphics subsystem supports all sorts of vector based operations and translations. Its a lot of fun to play with. Look at all of the shrunken window effects.
-- Oh Well
Jeeeze, just reading a few of the first posts on here you'd think that SVG icons were the end of the world. Nothing could be farther from the truth...
One of the big reasons I like OSX (and I do not own a Mac, FYI) are the scalable vector icons. We've had vector based fonts for quite some time and you'd be hard pressed to find anybody out there who would rally against the scourge of vector fonts. For crying out loud... I believe it's KDE that has font anti-aliasing. I am sure we all have seen WindowsXP's "clear type" font smoothing. Anti-aliased fonts work pretty damn well and look absolutely super!
Having the same capability with something as lowly as desktop icon is amazing! The next logical step is UI widgets and other elements of the desktop.
As more and more LCD and other high-quality displays become the norm (many laptops feature 1400x1050 or 1600x1200 displays these days), not only are scalable fonts and UI widgets neccessary, there is an inherent human aspect to having a computer interface with the same perceived clarity of the real world.
I think this is a fantastic implementation of vector graphics. I only hope that we can soon have entire UI's based around scalable graphics as well.
Right after OSX came out, I remember downloading a GTK and Gnome theme for my Linux box that copied the look, if not feel, of OSX. If I recall correctly, that theme was yanked by Apple's lawyers.
Since then I've started running a OSX box as well, and have to admit that I like the look.
Now I wonder -- would it be copyright infringement to write a script that extracted all of the SVG icons from a MacOSX box, copy them to a GTK theme directory, and run them on Linux? Thus the distributed theme itself wouldn't have any of the Apple look -- it would simply have the skeleton. The actual artwork would be copied by the end user in the privacy of their own home or office directly off a OSX box.
The second possibility for this is to be able to run, with almost the exact same look, GTK/Gnome apps on directly on OSX (Apple's release of X11 really is amazingly well done, btw). The X11 integration still wouldn't be perfect of course (apps still have a hard time mimizing to the Dock), but it would be a visual improvement. Or even integrate the ability to search a file's resources to get the SVG icon and display it in Nautilus by default.
In any case, librsvg sounds very promising. I'm impressed.
XML is a great thing. It could lead to the end of diferences in the look between toolkis and desktops. Most people complain about choise when desktops are made to look the same way, but acctually, this is choise. Today you can't make a gnome app use the file open dialog from kde. If QT-Designet can load glade files, why trolltech and gtk team work on a kind of wrapper for the call of signals, so if the programer want, he choose to load a XML file that contains the visual choosing what widget will take it? This would be not mandatory of couse, if people don't want, just don't use this, and keep working qt and gtk apps as now. But it would be very cool if I could load gimp saying to it: use qt instead of gtk today, thanks. :)
This is excellent news. After getting a new monitor that does 1600x1200, I found those tiny icons a bit hard to click at times. But now, I can run whatever resolution I want, and the icons will just look better & better.
:D
Heck, now the word "resolution" will start to have meaning! Instead of getting more small icons on your screen when going from 800x600 --> 1600x1200, you could get more detailed ones. And if it renders faster than PNG images, then we can have both great looks & high speed. Way to go!
Suppose you want your desktop to look in some specific way, without worrying about resolution. If you have a big monitor and/or an extra-high resolution maybe your standard sized icons will look very small, and, in the other hand, they could look pixelated if they are "standard" icons magnified.
With this you have icons that looks good and in the same aparent size in any resolution
And I want mine to be the same size regardless of my screen resolution. So I'll be happy and you can still use bitmaps.
Bloody hell - there is "the glass is half empty" and then there's "I hate glasses and really don't see what use they are to me or the rest of the planet".
Carpe Daemon
First, Gnome have SVG in real time, you can choose a .svg as icon file. KDE should had this for 3.1, but as their lib wasn't very good, they now target it for 3.2.
Second, they aren't saying gnome just got it, it's been there since 2.0, it's just better now.
PS: I'm a KDE user, but I'm fair, SVG in KDE still sucks.
I really think that scaleable icons are gonna be THE killer application of tomorrows operating systems.
Seriously, why not go all the way and question the whole concept of icons?
They could be allowed more degrees of freedom in their representation of a complex data object. Consider a 3D spinning folder icon, which somehow gives you an idea of how much data/what type of data is contained in the folder.
Now THAT would be neat.
So can we expect similar native SVG support from our favorite gratis and libre browsers (Mozilla, Opera, et al) soon? I think it's only been available via a plugin before.
Yes, but wouldn't it be nice to have more scaling choices than large/medium/small? There's more to SVG than just scaling graphics anyhow. Serialization is another goal of svg, hence you may be seeing the beginnings of webservices dedicated to serving up icons, animations, etc... XML and it's cooperative technologies are evolving rapidly.
SVG puts powerful non-proprietary (bye bye gif) graphics capabilities in the hands of the xml architect. It fills a necessary gap in the XML arsenal. As the other technologies evolve, it's benefits will become more readily apparent. Imagine an XSL transform capable of transforming an XML document containing data into a graphical representation of itself...
Programmable content can be embedded as well in the form of applets and XHTML objects. Apache's Batik project is a good example of what you can achieve. Batik can be found here.
-- Good judgement comes with experience. -- Experience comes with bad judgement.
Nice to see progress being made in this direction...
For thos who do not understand the value of making Svg work on the desktop, it's because you never worked with SVG before.
I've worked all summer long on a job where i had to make a (sacled down and very acurate) map available via web... and it had to be interactively linked to a database...
Now with fixed image this could have been a real pain, but once the map had been transfered from autocad, it was a simple matter: the text in tha map was clickable!
(well, i did have to write a script to build the Svg from a DXF file and it really needs to be cleaned before i post it)
The biggest problem i had to face was the fact that not a single svg viewer passed the W3c Test. The best one i had at the time (The Adobe SVG viewer) was not capable of anchor viewport (ie, using wahtever.svg#viewportdef to automagicaly load the viewport 'viewportdef')
I just wish the format could be more popular... it could the next flash...
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I don't see that it makes much sense. after all 16x16 or 32x33 icons have been around fr a long time. they're even-byte things and easy to handle. and they're quick
And so are SVG icons - a lot of the current SVG icons are quick to load (requiring considerably less memory to describe the icon than PNG) and quick to draw with this fast renderer. But that is ignoring the most useful part of describing your screen using vectors, splines, etc. - rescalability. We're all used to being able to switch monitors with different DPI and still have the same physical size font on the screen (so that 10 pt is 10/72 inch high regardless of screen dpi) and it's useful to be able to have icons which behave in the same way.
isn''t a desktop all about making a useful user experience? if I wanted gigantic icons I'd have gigantic icons, and I don't. It seems like extra complexity just for a coding exercise.
For people with normal eyesight, standard 16x16 or 32x32 icons are going to be fine. If you suffer from poor eyesight, being able to have fonts and icons at say 4x magnification is extremely useful. And a big part of the GNOME2 architecture is strongly accessibility orientated so this is a useful part of the puzzle.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
KDE in it's CVS version for KDE 3.0 was able to render .svgz (gzip-compressed svg's) in realtime as well (to be more exact: all crystal icons that existed up to that time) the feature has been disabled mostly due to maintainance issues and due to the fact that it was meant to be used for the default icon set. As the stuff hadn't been tested thoroughly until then and as it was only finished right for the last beta we postponed it for 3.2. Another reason was that the icon set wasn't in a final state.
So although almost all icons in kdelibs are rendered using svgz files you have to invoke kde2png explicetly to create larger pixmaps from svgz's.
But that's the point, you don't get 4 or 5 icons. If you're lucky you'ill get one "Small" and one "Large" icon.
Plus inside applications you tend to only get one size of icon regardless of screen resolution.
It is not only what you need on the desktop but also what people want. On a similar note, who *needs* flash on a webpage, or even GUI interfaces?
Personally I wouldn't mind seeing a truly open specification as the standard for scalable vector graphics, and this seems to be *the* candidate for it. From the w3c webpage on SVG:
SVG is a language for describing two-dimensional graphics in XML. SVG allows for three types of graphic objects: vector graphic shapes (e.g., paths consisting of straight lines and curves), images and text. Graphical objects can be grouped, styled, transformed and composited into previously rendered objects. Text can be in any XML namespace suitable to the appplication, which enhances searchability and accessibility of the SVG graphics. The feature set includes nested transformations, clipping paths, alpha masks, filter effects, template objects and extensibility.
SVG drawings can be dynamic and interactive. The Document Object Model (DOM) for SVG, which includes the full XML DOM, allows for straightforward and efficient vector graphics animation via scripting. A rich set of event handlers such as onmouseover and onclick can be assigned to any SVG graphical object. Because of its compatibility and leveraging of other Web standards, features like scripting can be done on SVG elements and other XML elements from different namespaces simultaneously within the same Web page.
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...to have a really good SVG editing tool. GIMP 1.3.1 shows that some GNOME developers have put some serious thought into Bezier editing tools, but nothing that has been released as a standalone vector editing app. killustrator, sodipodi and similar apps just aren't ready for prime time. If you're willing to spend the time to use it, the GIMP is really about as powerful as photoshop. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the open source world which is anywhere near as close to Adobe Illustrator functionatlity.
Worth noting that NeXT had display Postscript robustly implemented and SGI's window manager also had scalable fonts, but neither of these OS or GUIs are around today. If there's a lesson to be learned here, it is that the UI isn't significantly improved by scalable vector graphics. SVG is an improvement but not one which will make any competitive difference. Fortunately or unfortunately, the 25 year history of user interface points us in a different direction.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
GNOME's been doing SVG icons for a long time -- this is an evolutionary improvement. This is another area in which it took quite a while for KDE to catch up, not GNOME.
I wonder if KDE is using libsrvg to render the icons, as opposed to some Qt stuff. If so, both environments will immediately benefit.
May we never see th
Mozilla has a native SVG project that's been around for awhile.
I've always thought this would be the coolest thing ever: native SVG in a browser. I've thought of all sorts of great applications of this idea--I do mostly statistical analysis and to be able to put all the output, graphics and everything, into one file in a open, standard format that's read by a browser sounds wonderful.
The problem as I understand it is that the SVG library Mozilla currently uses has a license that's incompatible with the Mozilla license. Mozilla native SVG is available in a separate download and has some functionality, but not anywhere near all of it. I've always thought it seemed a bit strange that someone couldn't find a Mozilla-capable SVG library, or that it would be that difficult to build one (I would help, but I just don't have anywhere near the expertise necessary).
So, this stuff about Mozilla native SVG may seem offtopic, but it's really not, in a way: does anyone know if the library used for the SVG icons has any utility for Mozilla SVG or other open source browser-native SVG projects?
librsvg is faster *under certain circumstances*. Yes, if you create 2 milion vectors then it will be much slower. But most icons aren't made of 2 milion vectors, that's why they're faster.
I suggest you try out Sodipodi while it would be crazy to claim that it can do everything Illustrator can it is getting nice and usefull.
run your desktop at 2048x1536 and you'll get a harsh lesson in how poor the computing world deals with different resolutions.
.. Text Zoom] on mozilla & [View ... Text Size] on I.E.
If it wasn't for Mozilla's ability to have a minimum point size for fonts 75% of websites are too small to read (including my own).
Making a website that renders properly at all sorts of font sizes is a challenge.
A challenge made worse by I.E. & Mozilla's disagreement on what to change when you change the browser's font size. [View
I.e. doesn't change any font specified in pt, px em or en whereas moz changes soe of them but not others.
frikking n'mare
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Mozilla has an active SVG project. The renderer is not yet included in the main build, mostly for licensing reasons. But you can build it in yourself and there is someone that maintains a Windows build. See the link for more info.
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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Funny how you mention half-blind.
SVG is one of the few 'imaging technologies' that has very good support for accessibility. Each drawn object can have a title and a description, so whereas you see a "stuffed garbage can", the braille user-agent would output the desc text: "Garbage Can containing more than 1 MB of trash".
SVG could also be used for an org charts, and instead of having a long 'alt' tag would probably be out of sync with the 'gif', the blind user would be able to read the contents of each box, and depending on how the SVG is structured (with groups and defs), even get an idea of how the boxes are related.
Also, SVG supports CSS, so you can have different stylesheets for different media (screen, printer, cell-phone-screen, and even braille and audio).
As far as an imaging technology goes, since it's just another XML format, you can grab an XML document (say in the Weather Observation Markup Format) and use XSLT to output a nice SVG graphic showing the weather. (In fact, that's one of the example used in O'Reilly's SVG Essentials).
I've just started using SVG (with Python) as a way to transform map data from the US Govt and make nice little SVG maps for my browser (kind of like a hand-rolled Mapquest).
Programmers familiar with XML will be able to make some neat (albeit very ugly) stuff. Designers who know the fancier drawing tools will be able to make some pretty nice-looking stuff. Put 'em together and you can have some nice smart graphics. Will it replace flash? Who knows.
My father is a blogger.
I can't believe people here have so little imagination. It's almost like they are posting just to get modded up for having a 'radical' opinion. I mean, come on, what's the problem with SVG? It's not like the time spent coding on it is going to mean KDE3.2 will be delayed a month, or that Gnome will have more bugs. This is just one of the many enhancements that make Linux, and software in general, nicer. We should be talking about the fun things we can do with SVG, or the improvements that could be made, or any encouraging notes on it. Not about whether it has a point at all.
Let me illustrate some points for the creatively challenged:
So, onto something more positive: what's the state of SVG in KDE? I really enjoyed it in Gnome 2 for the time I used it, but it was a bit slower when they got large. These speed improvements are certainly good news.
Deformable matches are used in advanced medical applications between 3d volumetric images: CT, MRI, PET, etc.
-- Imperial units must die --
I seem to be alone here as the only person who actually thinks this is a fantastic idea...
:)
The whole point about SVG is that they will render nicely whatever the screen size... This isn't only relevant for big screens. This means that my iPAQ's tiny little 320x240 screen won't have to be eaten up by huge bitmap icons.
The SVG stuff should tie in beautifully with the sub-pixel rendering in X.
Congratulations to the author(s) for their great work..
Looks like linux just gained yet another feature that windows is lacking.
Well Done
If this lib as fast as it claims (at rendering though I doubt parsing), then why not? Windows and other elements in the display would break-down into SVG commands that would be rendered as required. Perhaps it would prove a very efficient way of presenting a remote desktop too rather than sending down bitmaps like VNC does at present.
Thing is, frequently you want a loss of quality when you scale an icon. Who cares about all the pretty brown crinkles in the Gnome foot icon when it's at 12 x 12? They won't read like crinkles, they'll read like a muddy mess. A simple outline is probably best at that size.
Now, a format that defines a priority heirarchy among the vectors on the image, and a scaling factor at which size various low priorities of vectors are not rendered... That might be very, very useful for icons.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned a key benefit of SVG desktops: session migration.
Ever notice how primitive systems like WinXX have some serious layout problems with a network login user moving from their "usual" 1280x1024 desktop to a temporary workstation that is set for 800x600? The icons get repositioned to be visible, destroying any custom layout the user had -- and that is assuming they were all in the upper/left of the screen. Heaven forbid the user had bothered with placing any of them on the right hand edge of their screen!
Deploying a "thin client" desktop is even worse, as you need to be able to scale the virtual desktop to fit the physical screen being used at the time. As PCs become more innocuous (think payphones), it will be natural for people to expect to have an identical session no matter what they are using to link with their home server session.
Sure we're still 5-10 years from the point where those facilities are "needed", but without a solid foundation in place we can't even think about deploying those kind of systems efficiently.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
AFAIK it is more compliant at the moment because it supports more SVG features. But librsvg is just a static renderer, whereas KSVG aims to offer a complete DOM model to KJS, KDE's JavaScript engine. This allows Macromedia Flash-like interactive animations using SVG+JavaScript.
According to http://www.w3.org/2001/07/SVG10-IPR-statements.htm l
and
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Disclosures,
this appears to have been resolved to permit
royalty-free use.
If this is true, that's a real victory for the new W3C policy (and for the world in general). Thanks to all. Please let me know if I'm misinterpreting something.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
This is cool and all, but is anyone else shuddering at the idea of a Gnome build with even more library dependencies than it has now? Screw getting a cup of coffee while Gnome builds, it's more like grow your own beans, roast them, age them, grind them...
For a program I'm writing, I use Ghostscript to render some postscript in one of my windows, but I wouldn't dream of using it to render my GUI widgets. :-)
The ocean parts and the meteors come down
Laid out in amber, baby.
Crystal SVG was developed using Adobe Illustrator 9.
Although, being a windows user i could only view it using the Adobe SVG Viewer which only works in IE, any of you have an idea of how to make it work under opera7 drop me a line:)
How about "SVG's Very Good"?
you can take the road that takes you to the stars...
Remember how the NeXT boxes had postscript displays? Whatever needed to be drawn on the screen was expressed as postscript, and the display was a postscript renderer. It worked beautifully.
SVG is much more powerful (for desktop things, not necessarily for printing/typesetting things) than postscript. I think this is an excellent step.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I'm not so sure why it would be faster to render the SVG and display the PNG (which needs to be decompressed), but keep in mind that it may depend on the test platform. Under Mac OS X 10.1, a lot of people were using a little command line hack that compressed the frame buffer. The memory bus was a bottle neck, and it was faster to compress and decompress the frame buffer than it was to move the uncompressed frame across the bus.. Just a thought.. CPU cycles are cheap, improve the memory system is not..
I don't want my icons to be huge!
You just don't get it. Size should be a property of the rendering, not of the icon. SVG allows this, bitmaps don't.
You can make an icon out of any SVG file by telling your desktop to render it. Not only that, but it looks good whether you are on 1920*1200 or 640*480.
You would think with everyones rant that this was really new technology. Vector image formats are not new.
In fact there is an age old debate, of bitmap (pixel-based) and vector. Pixel based has it's drawbacks of not being scalable, and being bigger in file size. Vector, on the otherhand is scaleable and smaller in file size.
We should, however, remember the big tradeoff for vector, and that is what is gained in scalable quality is lost in rendering processor time. I could imagine some extremely complex icons being created really grinding GNOME on the rendering. Additionally, add XML as the native format, while useful in many applications, processing/parsing XML is not the ideal...
I'll be impressed when I see it and run it on my old beater box that I currently can run GNOME on...
Although, I guess if it really " renders them faster than libpng renders the same images in png format." maybe it'll be the holy gail afterall.
I read this claim again and again, and it still doesn't sit well with me. I worked on a vector-based rendering engine for awhile (in fact, the fastest vector-based rendering engine [begins with an f, ends with a lash]), and there are certain limitations that cannot be overcome.
When it ultimately gets down to it, a PNG file is a compressed bitmap. There is a fixed cost to rendering it, which can be expressed as an amortization of the dimensions of the image. Its just like fill-rate on a 3-D card.
When rendering any vector format, there are many dependencies. Is AA enabled? Which AA algorithm was used? Are they using a scanline renderer, or actually rasterizing each vector regardless of its impact?
The same reason which allows SVG to be faster than PNG rendering is the same reason that other cases will be radically slower: rendering each vector disregards the size of the image being rendered. How can this make it slower? Imagine an image filled dozens or hundreds of times with the same vectors that fill the image completely. Suddenly, we're not having to fill a rectangle, we're having to fill it multiple times in comparison to the png drawing in the same space. And the problem gets worse the larger the destination size.
Using a scanline renderer for vector based graphics has a much better cost comparison to png format, but it will always be slower as ultimately bitmaps can be embedded within vector formats.
As a simpler analogy; the vector graphics are to the transformation pipeline or a graphics card what bitmaps (and pngs) are to the rasterization on the video card. Transformation without rasterization is meaningless, and therefore always going to be slower.
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
You are wrong on two counts: 1. There is a full syncronization between animation and graphics in Adobe SVG Viewer. Adobe audio element works just like SMIL audio element with all synchronization stuff available for it. 2. There is already an agreement that it should be perfectly legal to embed SMIL audio element in and SVG document and it should work just the way Adobe audio element does now.
I used to fall into this trap from time to time myself. See, whenever somebody on Slashdot says "standard," they mean one of very specific thing: a specification entangled in draconian license terms that make commercial use impossible. No standard created and promoted by a company can be a "standard" in the Slashdot sense. So Flash is not a "standard" for the same reason that the QuickTime file format is not a "standard:" because, despite the fact that they are fully documented and readily available for any to use, both of those formats were developed by companies. And companies, of course, are inherently bad, according to Slashdot collectivist groupthink.
It's an easy mistake to make, misunderstanding the common usage of the word "standard" on Slashdot. The same problem arises with the word "open," and don't even get me started on the word "free."
I write in my journal
You may want to check out Fresco, which would allow exactly that. In particular, the Fresco vs. X page might be interesting to you.
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