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SVG And The Free Desktop (s)
unmadindu writes "Christian Schaller has written an interesting article on SVG's current and possible uses on the GNU/Linux desktop. Though the article concentrates mostly on GNOME, it does mention the excellent work the KDE developers have been doing with KSVG, and refers to the upcoming SVG support in Mozilla too."
1) Make decent icons to begin with.
2) Use a decent scaling algorithm that preserves quality.
I remember SGI's 4DWM having completely vector based graphics back in 1992 (and probably before that). Has anyone else done it in the interim?
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Would it have killed you to say Scalable Vector Graphics once in the article?
At least until longhorn...
I think that's a bit unfair. I for one would be happy if SVG was better supported as a web technology. The advantages to it becoming a standard is that useful, zoomable, interactive charting could be done easily on the client side. Just a little XML on the server side and then let the client deal with it. Right now I use Batik to render the SVG XML to PNG images before sending them to the client. Of course, the client can't zoom in on interesting areas like they can with pure SVG.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The article mentions several ongoing SVG projects. Worth mentioning is Mozilla's efforts in this arena.
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Just another article that doesn't explain the acronym.
Maybe it's just me, but I'm wondering when SVG will become Flash. Or am I comparing apples and oranges here?
-What have you contributed lately?
They're great for displaying technical drawings. I'd like to see more architectual diagrams on the web, both software architecture and the physical type. With bitmapped graphics, web designers are pretty much limited to small low resolution images, dumbing down detail to a marketroid white sheet level. Vector graphics scale very well for diagrams and cad drawings.
Steganography? Are you going for a keyword karma whoring? Because your post is just silly. Who would try to embed some secret information in an XML file when the whole purpose of XML is so the files can easily be edited in an arbitrary text editor? It doesn't make any practical sense... Even if you encode the text somehow, its presence would still stick out like a much larger sore thumb than, say, a message hidden in a JPG file.
This is not really how it is supposed to work. The cool thing about steganography is, that you might not even know, that a picture has a message encrypted in it, because the data is there any way. since XML is clear text, one could easily see any encrypted text in it, as it is NOT clear text... of course, you could put tags with encrypted text in it that wouldnt get displayed, and as probably only few people would bother reading the source of a svg file, only few people would find out. but if you want to, you can have the pure ciphertext and run cryptographic attacks on it. So it is not really anything like steganography, you could as well hide your encrypted text in the comments of a pdf file or whatever...
I think the author is refering to the embeding of other types of XML in a SVG image. You can for example use HTML and MathML inside an SVG file, or even your own XML based data format.
I hear Osama is hiding in a specifically crafted xml document.
I recently dabbled in SVG for a website. I learned with that and a dash of javascript I could completely replace a java applet with a few kilobytes of code.
SVG is finding its way into everything, browsers, icons, etc. I forsee a world where SVG is dominant and regular pixel based images are seen as WAV files as in comparison to MIDI.
As a matter of fact that is a good analogy: MIDI vs WAV. One is intrections on how to draw the other is the final outcome.
Imagine how many songs you could fit on a CD if it were midi, with human voice parameters. Ignoring the vocals, you'd get thousands of songs on a CD.
SVG also fixes the pixelation issue, whenyou try to stretch and compress the image. As a matter of fact, do that once with a regualr image and you're working with crap. You can shrink SVG blow it up, and rotate without any kind of distortion.
It is kind of suprising it took us this long to get a cross-platform standard on how to specify how to draw shapes! But it is a good thing.
I don't think computers will ever be the same once SVG takes off.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
This could make for some really interesting desktops, if this is what I think it is. Make some interesting graphical effects within icons or as the desktop without dragging the system down. I can see a new type of desktop where the start menu is replaced by an interactive desktop background. Personally, I hate the damn start menu (including the Linux implementations) as an incredibly ineffieicient way to organize menus. But, that's just my opinion- obviously someone has to like it.
Yes, you could embed any data (including scripts), and with a ECMAScript capable renderer, even use it to generate the image (for graphs etc).
That's not what steganography is, though. I suggest you review what steganography is.
A big blob of <[CDATA[ would stick out like a sore thumb in an SVG. It's best to stick with embedding int Tiffs and Wavs.
Not exactly. Linux is the kernel, X Windows is the GUI, and KDE (or GNOME) is the Desktop Environment. The whole package together is called GNU/Linux, but most people just call it Linux. I sidestep the whole GNU/Linux vs. Linux debate by just calling it Mandrake or Debian or Redhat, but that's just me.
So, in summary:
SVG allows you to embed a lot more than just the graphics related info, like you said it can be any text or text encoding, so you can put fonts, bitmap thumbnails, info on what the file is (think keywords for search systems) author info, licensing info, whatever takes your fancy.
i tell you the wave of the future is XML image formats.. nothing gets compression like XML.. umm ...nm
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
I work at the Center for Teaching, Learning Technology at the university I am enrolled at. I am currently putting together a web-based document management system that is built around XML, and after seeing how much more powerful these open standards can be (especially, when you start looking at all the wonderful concepts that augment XML -- XSL, XPATH, XSL:FO, and the like).
We used to put together all of our documentation for workshops and whatnot using MS Word, and then later switched to InDesign for the sake of having more control over the layout. The new web-based system means we lost some control over the layout of these documents, but the amount of time we've saved and the flexibility we've gained from using it is worth more than its weight in gold (all 2mb worth -- if that, even)
What's frightening, however, is to see these products like MS Word and others potentially offering the option to export to a more open format, like XML. Ever tried reading through MS Word generated HTML? It's almost a fun task, and I hate to think of the possibilty of having to read through MS Word generated XML... eep!
huzzah
This is great. I will be able to play Tempest and Qix in my workstation desktop background.
Nice work!
Umm... and I can... um...
I can play asteroids! Yeah! That's great too!
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I didn't say it had to be "secret". The point is that who would be looking in images? How many people outside Slashdot would even know that that was possible?
libertarianswag.com
If *you* need SVG support (with creating it) now that your desktop supports it, I highly recommend the fine folks in #svg on the Freenode IRC network.
Yes, I do know it was a troll.
That's actually a very good comparison
Except that we have compressed formats for images.
So it's closer to comparing MIDI to MP3. And let us be frank - Midi has lost that battle.
Then again, you view an image at half size much much more often than you want to listen to audio at half tempo - so maybe it will win there.
But unless we get much faster processing of vector graphics, then you are going to end up caching the rendered bitmaps anyway - and then you don't really have any reason not to source from bitmaps in the first place.
Having a desktop where everything can zoom and rotate and deform freely is an interesting idea - but in practice you'll end up choosing a few effects and sticking to them. So SVG for experimentation, then convert to bitmaps for real use?
Famous Last Web Development Words
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I'd like to see SVG used more frequently for all sorts of things. I'm not a big fan of XML, but it seems like it'd be quite appropriate in many situations where bitmap formats are ordinarily used. Not only would such images be scalable, but it seems like they would be much easier to manipulate (how about typing or tweaking your images with a text editor?). Drawing languages are more interesting than bitmap formats, since you can actually do things with objects instead of pixels. I would be more interested in using SVG if a more 'flattened' wrapper format could be used to contain equivalent data ("rect 0 0 50 50 blue 5") making it easier to type by hand, and avoiding bloated XML data.
Around 1994 or so I had an updated version of this working. It was a major revision, so it was called SVGA.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
You have your globs reversed. Save yourself the trouble and just call it Unix.
KDE is a desktop. GNOME is another, and XFCE, GNUstep, and XPde are others.
"Even if you encode the text somehow, its presence would still stick out like a much larger sore thumb than, say, a message hidden in a JPG file."
But XML does give you plenty of potential hiding places for data (e.g. white-space)
It's not exactly an unknown procedure. My local newspaper had a column about it, for crissakes. Any half-decent image manipulation tool will happily display file comments (which is what your "steganography" would be).
Which won't stop the artists-of-the-slightly-funny-deal from bundling an image-comment reader in their $50 "people-are-watching-you-OMG" software package.
So far, the best SVG authoring app is Xstudio6. It has easy to use dialogs for just about every single aspect for the SVG 1.1(I think) spec.
Downside is it costs ~$400. A bit pricey for me to goof off with. Thankfully there's
Inkscape/sodipodi, but there's no animation support. It's mainly for static images.
SVG is quite powerful and I can't wait until the day someone goes overboard and makes a FPS out of it(which would be an interesting test of Adobe's SVG plugin). C'mon widespread adoption go go go.
Now, SVG would make a lot of sense on a
vector display. However, where could you
get a modern vector display nowadays?
They used to sell arcade machines (battlezone)
and game consoles (vectrix) with these
displays.
Bram Stolk http://stolk.org/tlctc/
... so I can finally use my 8 way Opteron with 16GB to its fullest potential!!
Has anyone ever written any steganography which hides text in plain sight? I.e., a somewhat normal looking piece of text, which contains encoded, different data. Don't answer funny, you see what I'm getting at.
Well duh, the whole point steganography is that you can't prove the data is even there.
"SVG is finding its way into everything, browsers, icons, etc. I forsee a world where SVG is dominant and regular pixel based images are seen as WAV files as in comparison to MIDI."
Oh whatever will photographers do. SVG isn't a replacement for bitmaps, they both have their place, and as I pointed out elsewere you can embed an image into SVG.
"As a matter of fact that is a good analogy: MIDI vs WAV. One is intrections on how to draw the other is the final outcome."
The tracking scene isn't dead.
"SVG also fixes the pixelation issue, whenyou try to stretch and compress the image. As a matter of fact, do that once with a regualr image and you're working with crap. You can shrink SVG blow it up, and rotate without any kind of distortion.""
Within limits. Fonts are vector-based and they need hinting to bring out their best.
"I don't think computers will ever be the same once SVG takes off."
The problem is that no one (open or closed) has a complete implimentation. What good is a standard that you can't use?
What makes SVG even cooler is that we have the perfect rendering technology for it: Cairo. Cairo renders perfectly stroked and antialiased SVG for a variety of backends including bitmaps, PostScript, and X11.
Hopefully the SVG projects will either adopt the existing Cairo SVG code or use the Cairo rendering code as a backend for their SVG libraries.
Then why did you respond, dumbass?!
I foresee a world where SVG is dominant and regular pixel based images are seen as WAV files as in comparison to MIDI.
Except residential casual copyright infringers no longer trade MIDI or MOD files anymore. Most now trade .mp3 (MPEG audio) or .ogg (Ogg Vorbis audio) files on P2P networks.
Imagine how many songs you could fit on a CD if it were midi, with human voice parameters.
By "human voice parameters" do you mean a recording of Britney's actual voice compressed with Speex or some other wideband CELP codec? Otherwise, "human voice parameters" will never sound exactly like Britney Spears. And since when has the quality of real-time digital synthesis improved to such that substituting MIDI for the recorded performance of a full orchestra to satisfy an audiophile?
Ignoring the vocals, you'd get thousands of songs on a CD.
"Ignoring the vocals" means ignoring the vast majority of the music played on commercial FM radio today. Besides, "thousands of songs on a CD" would make CDs more expensive, as the label would have to pay extra royalties to the songwriters(' publishers). Sure, Mutopia would be able to pack a sound font and a thousand .ly.gz files onto an affordable CD, but Mutopia is an isolated case.
SVG also fixes the pixelation issue
The future of digital imaging among residential users lies in photos and video. Digital cameras output photos made of pixels. What the heck kind of autotrace are you imagining for resizing a photo? Manual trace takes work; a typical residential user just wants to blow up a photo and print it or blow up video to fit on a 32" TV.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Some of you have remarked that MIDI has lost. Well, ear interpretations are not analogous to visual interpretations.
I was more referring about the costs to a computer of using them.
However if you do compare SVG icons to Bit-map icons, visually, the SVG icon will not only be simpler, and usually just as apealing.
Look at the SVG icon sets referenced and the background of Slax (Slackware's LiveCD) The #1 comment is "aww he's so cute". Clearly, the visual accptance is much higher to the human eye than MIDI's acceptance to the human ear.
MIDI could be re-invented to include wavelets which are a base representation of a voice (instrument or human) then define the mathmatical operations. You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size.
Example (as SVG):
Now human voices are harder, but once downloaded you could just download the contents of the tree.
You could also hear brittney sing "Opps.." in her original voice or her aged voice, which would be interesting. Or even make Christina Agulera sing Spear's songs.
If you're seeing the potential of re-defining MIDI like that, surely you can see hwo awesome SVG is...
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Sure, that's been happening for years.
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
I would be happy if I found out I won the lottery, but that ain't going to happen either. For a variety of reasons, SVG has lost out to more proprietary options; and while you and I lose out as linux users - we can't pretend that the market has made its' decision.
Anyone remember vector monitors? Those things would be great to resurrect, supposing that SVG really kicks in on the desktop, and also supposing that we get some svg version of asteroids shipping with those new o/s installs... nice!
stuff |
Yeah yeah yeah "Flash sucks, blah blah blah."
/. community would update their knowledge accordingly.
Dude, the web is full of badly designed websites written in HTML. Is HTML a bad standard?
Flash is capable of creating compact little applications, parsing XML from a data source, playing video, and doing a million other things that are made possible by the ubiquitous Flash player. We've moved on from the days of 'skip intro.' I wish the
Sheesh!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Are you going for a keyword karma whoring?
:)
Nah, if he was doing that he'd at least have to spell Steganography right in the subject
With the vectrex video game system
I wonder... could those games be made to run under SVG... with frame buffering....
Two points:
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
So the fact that I use say fluxbox or windowmaker
as a windowmanager and no additional "desktop"
bloat means that I don't have a desktop
or a full GNU/Linux installation?
That is retarded.
I would suggest that GNU/Linux is (generally)
everything in your list up and including to Xwindows and some windowmanager. The desktop
stuff like KDE and GNOME are just further enhancements on top of the windowmanager.
But they should "never" be considered an
essential part of a GNU/Linux system.
What I predict people will do is use programs like Illustrator, or equivilent. Export out, then run it through an optimizer (e.g. a circle command instead of line segments, etc). Then gzip that and you're ready to go.
It is only a natural evolution from character based displays to bitmaps to vector graphics. The main advantage of vector graphics is resolution independence. Imagine installing a very high resolution screen, and instead of everything getting smaller everything gets sharper. Want to display more information on the screen? Just seemlessly zoom in and out of your desktop. Currently, most windows systems are bitmap based, although there are some kludgy ways of adapting to different resolutions without changing the size of your text and windows and icons.
The big problem is that our current screens are just not good enough. Monitors rarely get over 150dpi, whereas even very old laser printers get 300dpi. On most screens, you can still see the individual dots. This is why zooming in and out like I described above wouldn't work on current hardware: too much detail is lost when the zoomed out desktop is rasterized to the screen. It would be only good for previewing the windows (like Apple's Expose), not for actually working with them. Note that in the area where these issues matters the most, text and font display, there has been a great amount of research and clever solutions to work around this. If (when?) display technology finally catches up, the entire windows system will be arbitrarily scaled with good quality, not just the fonts. Let's hope that when the hardware get's good enough, the software to utilize it will already be in place.
Midi. On the web. I understand your enthusiasm more then I sympathize with your analogy. Have you been to a Geocities site with midi on it recently? ;-)
Somethings are just better left alone.
Quack, quack.
That's not SVG.
Embedding text inside a picture and encrypting is pretty useless and dangerous anyway. If the text is encrypted, it is more easily detectable. The reason: most encryption algorithms begin with a characteristic block, like "BEGIN SHA 1 " (hence, all one has to do is scan the picture for the string containing "BEGIN SHA 1") which indicates 2 things: there is a hidden text, and it is encrypted, and the algorithm used is SHA. One could run a dictionary attack on the text, and decrypt it.
It's time for pixels to go away. With displays running from cellphones to graphic arts workstations, the concept just isn't useful any more above the renering level. I look forward to replacing as many as possible of the old pixel-based graphics format with something I can see at more than one display resolution.
Now if we can just get the Xwindows folks on board! When I say "12-point type", I mean a height of 6 lines per inch, not 12 pixels (enormous on the cellphone; invisible on the workstation).
Welcome to the Turing Tarpit, where everything is possible but nothing interesting is easy.
Hell, Y-Windows is thinking of using SVG for describing all their widgets. They plan a 1.0 release within the year.
SVG is being used almost everywhere I look. Icons are just the beginning.
Who would try to embed some secret information in an XML file Didn't MS get a patent on XML file formats that have data encrypted inside them?
Post: Sigged, for your pleasure.
no one wants it
Not quite true.
Vodafone will start putting SVGT 1.2
on 3 out of 4 tiers of their data enabled live! handsets
(on all except the very low end tier)
in October 2004.
I just have to ask...
Who fucking cares?
Surely we have better things to concentrate our energy on than arguing over a naming scheme when referring to the kernel or to userspace. I think newbies are turned off from our community for this reason, among others.
They're going to just call it Linux. I don't see why that's a problem whatsoever. This isn't about stroking egos so that everyone's damn project gets named in reference. "GNU/XFree86/GNOME/Linux" sucks.
SVG - or more specifically, the Adobe Plugin for SVG, has some interesting features that makes the use of SVG even more interesting..
The Adobe SVG provides the user a getURL() (or similar named) method which allows the browser to read information from the server or any other arbitary url on the web without any form submits of page refreshes.
This is useful, for instance, to have a stock exchange ticker which continuosly reads data from a stock exchange server and renders a graph of the values on the screen - without requiring the browser to refresh.
Another interesting aspect of SVG is that it can be compressed using gzip and so a fairly complex svg image could still be in a very small file. The data that is passed into the SVG could also be compressed.
For instance, the SNOW whitespace steganography encoder.
There are a few nice SVG-GIS (geographic information services) sites out there: vienna and even nebraska
I hear he has his own namespace:
xmlns:osama="http://osama.bin.org/osama/1.0"
Are there any project currently in development to make an OSS version of Flash using SVG? Would anyone like to start one?
Well at least he didn't spell it like shorthand writing.
You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size.
Great, so now we can have sound files of an infinite size!
Does anyone know where to find the rsvg Mozilla plugin by Dom Lachowicz?
That's 3, Informative, at most.
Data that's encrypted for transport through a text-only environment (e.g., email), and to be decrypted by a piece of software supporting multiple ciphers, looks like that -- a header describing what kind of encryption you're using, followed by the encrypted data, which is encoded using the base64 algorithm.
But the encrypted data itself, after stripping the header and de-base64ing it, just looks like random binary noise.
If your recipient knew what encryption algorithm you were going to use to encrypt, you could just leave the header off, and if you're hiding the encrypted data in an image format that allows binary data (SVG, being XML, doesn't, but most image formats, such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, are binary), you wouldn't even need to base64 it.
Liberty in your lifetime
RT Whole FA, dumbass.
Has anyone else had the problem that SVG just plain doesn't work? I'm running debian unstable and SVG doesn't work anywhere. No SVG icons in gnome, mozilla doesnt display SVG graphics, and KDE's (3.2.1) konqueror doesn't display them either. All three of these have independant SVG implementations and none of them work. Any ideas?
JAADEA - Just another article that doesn't explain the acronym.
Just another acronym that does not include that
WTF? FYI, IANAWriter, so IMHO YMMV.
Can't wait for SVG, JPEG, Ogg, MP3, AAC, et al support in my MMORPGs.
So, one bummer about SVG is that you can't have it enabled in Mozilla and, say, Gnome at the same time.
Mozilla uses a hacked-up libsvg that interferes with other programs. So, SVG is turned off in Debian Mozilla packages, for instance.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
The last thing we need is an arbitrarily large audio format.
(<shameless plug> our SVG webcomic: Pandimaniacs, also in PNG </shameless plug>)
So far, SVG still needs a plugin, like the Adobe one. Thankfully they released a Linux version, but we still have to use <object> and <embed> tags. I look forward to the day where we can use <img>, at least as an alternative. I personally have not been able to build mozilla with SVG yet, hope it gets mainstream soon.
Pandimaniacs: in english, german, P
I posted this on OSNews, but I'll post it again here...
I'm not sure why so many people think that SVG is slow. It doesn't have to be, even without hardware acceleration. I've done tests of librsvg vs. libpng:
Given a SVG image $s. Transform it into a PNG image $p using librsvg, Batik, or something similar. Run "gdk_pixbuf_new_from_file()" on both $p and $s. This will turn $s and $p into identical RGBA images. Time this operation. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Generally, it is no slower (if not faster!) to render $s than $p. This surprised me and quieted many "Vector graphics are too slow for the desktop" pundits.
Of course, once you start using some of the more advanced features (like certain filters), the rendering time is likely to go up. It all depends on what features you use and how you use them.
Well... for Inkscape I know that it's high up on the lists for some of the developers, and several of them are actually investigating various factors now.
Animation and scripting support are two things that may go in hand-in-hand, but definitely are being worked on. Of course, since it's open source, there's no hard timeline for supporting it, but I would not be supprised to see it in the CVS versions in the next quarter. The internals are being reworked now in a way that will facilitate that better.
FYI IAAN
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
That's true, but it still kinda sticks out like a sore thumb. The way I'd recommend doing it is hard-wrapping the text and using spaces at the end of each line past a certain column to encode the information. You could probably encode it in source code by selectively using a mix of tabs and spaces for indentation too ;)
Karma: Contrapositive
ls /bin
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
For ages I've longed for something to make and share quick sketches with my collegues. A picture is worth a thousand words, so to speak. And sometimes it seems to take a thousand words to explain what could be drawn in a quick sketch. The trouble is, bitmapped formats suck for line drawings, and breaking out Flash tools for a quick sketch is a bit much. So gimme a quick, easy vector format, that my friends can read in their browsers and email clients!
``MIDI could be re-invented to include wavelets which are a base representation of a voice (instrument or human) then define the mathmatical operations. You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size.''
.MOD does.
I think that's basically what
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The problem of SVG is most of the space are taken up by command strings. Instead of opcodes, we have command strings that can have infinite length. Embedded objects have to be expanded into mime64 format, which adds 33% to every byte of data. Even with compressions, it still adds considerable amount of data that can be saved by binary equivalent, such as WebCGM. The whole issue of human readable code is only relevant when people are reading it, not when the processing are done by machines. The whole SVG spec sounds like Postscript/PDF all over again. Such kind of bloat is not acceptable in a world filled with Windoze machines. If we were to make SVG as a viable choice for GUI, just use WebCGM. WebCGM is a W3C open standard, handles vector and raster data, but without the bloat of SVG.
SVG is very useful on its own, but having an open alternative to Flash would be even better. SMIL, a W3C Recommended standard for adding timing and animation to things like SVG and XHTML, is that alternative.
The Mozilla team has (wrongly, IMO) decided to leave full SMIL implementation to plugins. However, the W3C has designated a subset of the SMIL 2.0 modules as being suitable for integration with XHTML, which is obviously functionality that belongs in the browser and is already available in IE6.
To keep Mozilla competitive, allow SVG to reach its full potential, and help kill Flash, I'd like to encourage everyone to vote for two Bugzilla bugs:
If you don't already have a Bugzilla account, you can get one painlessly -- if you use Mozilla you owe it to the community to help direct the project.
I think your description of MIDI might be throwing people off.
MIDI is best thought of as a nothing more than stream of events, usually a series of note beginnings and note endings and some other music-related paraphenalia. No "sounds" at all are in the data stream (though I'd be surprised if some implementations didn't have this as an extention).
Whereas a snippet of SVG might say something like, "draw this curve here with such-and-such an angle at this location in reference to center", a snippet of MIDI might say, "play this note of such-and-such octave for a certain duration."
The quality of both SVG and MIDI will depend on the tool that's being used to render them. It's indeed possible to have an SVG image rendered with no antialiasing in 16 colors by one program (likely a cell phone) and then have the same image rendered in 16 millions colors at 1600x1200 antialiased glory-filled pixels in another. Similarly, you can play a MIDI file on a $2 synth PC sound card and it'll sound just a bit better than an old NES. Play the same well-sequenced MIDI file in a full-blown multi-thousand dollar sound studio and the average Joe would have a hard time believing that it wasn't a real orchestra.
he Adobe SVG provides the user a getURL() (or similar named) method which allows the browser to read information from the server or any other arbitary url on the web without any form submits of page refreshes.
Given that SVG looks like it will be all over the place, this "feature" will have to be carefully watched. You could do web bugs
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
That's what SNOW does (see link in other post in this thread).
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Yes, it is relatively easy to do this, but not in a public key kind of fashion.
One way to do it is to have a template, as it were, that tells which words to pull out of a given text to make the message.
Another is to use plain-text words (it's still gibberish, but readable gibberish) as "pointers" to a separate dictionary. For example, "Meat Puppet Martha Stewart" could translate in your dictionary to "Bring Home a gallon of milk", when you put the words together.
Yet another is to have an algorithm, say, "the first letter of each sentence is a letter of a word", as used in "Quicksilver". So, while "TFLOESILOW" isn't much of a word, someone sufficiently adept at it could probably do readable text with this method to encrypt shorter messages.
Or, perhaps the first word of each sentence is used.
I would say that these are all forms of stenography.
One common trick that was used in many of the spy books I read was to embed messages in classified ads, say, in the personals section. "Joe, your sister has really laid a golden egg! Call home now!", could mean, "Agent X, abort mission. Contact for new mission briefing." Or, an agreed-upon number, such as the dow jones industrial average closing number, is used by both parties to index their code book...
With bitmap maps each zoom or pan requires a trip back to the server and a drudgy delay for the user. SVG makes for a better user experience with zoom and pan using one set of data on the client.
And with SVG it is easy to add animations such as a bus or a train onto the map.
SVGmaker transcodes Office documents to SVG. Some sample documents at the site.
Teach me not to test my links! The bugs mentioned in the parent are #231729 and #216462.
Does anybody know why Bugzilla does this?
When I can import a SVG image into OpenOffice then it will be useful. In the meantime SVG is really rather useless, because there is precious little that will import your nice SVG digram, graph, or whatever.
Sure, it is undecipherable. But one misses the point of steganography. That was my point.
Just about a year ago i remember there was a SVG story here on /., and i was amazed to see how many nay-sayers there were posting that SVG would never really succeeed. More than 10 people pointed out that Adobe has not even developed the SVG plugin in years and stopped supporting it.
Now it seems as though the majority of people here are very strongly supporting it and rallying behind it. At least thats a start.
Natural Selection: self-destruction of the poor and lazy
hey there! .. hell I've never expected such a lot of replies now that's great!
I tried to follow this discussion right here but it gained to be a bit too big for me now to easily follow it
I'd advise to continue this really COOL discussion on the SVG-Cafe (http://www.svg-cafe.com), I like that as its a lot easier to navigate on that one.. here's the direct link to the new thread that I've created, would be glad to see you all there!! Here's the THREAD!
See ya there,
Tha SVGEvangelist
Yeah, that kind of thing is obvious. What I was looking for was an algorithm which would encode an arbitrary secret into a meaningful block of text. Bonus points if I can specify that block of text beforehand. No pre-sharing of secrets. You know, the whole 9 yards, same as with the binary kind.
hey there again,
Sorry got the url wrong for the Link to the thread to discuss all this here on an easier way, here we go again: SVG and its Future on Desktop, Mobiles and other Devices!
Tha SVGEvangelist
You Know I'm really starKing to get sicK of the naminK Konventions for KDE.
The next remark is false. The previous remark is true.
One word: Rampant faggotry.
I think a better link for SVG would be to http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/, which has news and links to the various specs, instead of linking to the SVG recommendation.
Phillip
Adobe updated their linux SVG plugin last Dec. and it now works with the latest mozilla.
why do you think that you should use vector graphics just to resize them? blowing up vector graphics looks like ass because it turns into cartoons. so given that you're going to start from a canonical representation and just make it smaller, using a smart scaling algorithm is the way to go. way less complexity than vector graphics and it looks better, too (unless you plan to to put a raytracer in that vector format). have you ever looked at the mac os x icons?
Here's another site that's done in SVG (click around).
Here's another implimentation SVGL done in OpenGL.
It does indeed, very true - but then what I wrote above was a parlour-game which was meant to be spotted, and it's meaning figured out - and not proper steganography where the intention is the converse.
What's the damn difference?
I meant large solid objects...
! .... I'm speechless.
Please learn what the hell MIDI even is before proposing that it gets reinvented, kthx.
(Hint: nothing is stopping you from doing everything you proposed right now, with MIDI exactly as it is - MIDI doesn't, and shouldn't (ever) have anything to do with sound creation)
OS X icons are vector based but saved as bitmaps in different sizes. Kinda like KDE's: 128x128, 64x64, 32x32 and so on, but I don't know the actual numbers.
What OS X does more, is scaling the icons on the fly between those descrite resolutions. And I must admit the algorithm that does that is very good indeed.
I don't think a proprietary plugin for a W3C standard is really a good answer for this problem. Mozilla has the XML and display infrastructure to make SVG work. It just needs to be diddled a bit to work with free desktop libraries.
Evan Prodromou | evan@prodromou.name | http://evan.prodromou.name/
To convert raster images into SVG, I recommend the open-source Delineate raster to SVG converter.
The Delineate gallery page has several web poster art SVG images, including my favorite war and peace.
SVG is a perfect format for interactive visualizations of dynamic data.
For example, here is an interactive genealogical data visualization that was produced using XSLT transformations and published as a RESTful service via a Java servlet. The sourceforge project has more information on how the visualization was produced.
Use SVG as a medium to visually repurpose data to create your own interpretation of the world!
All of Wikipedia is a victim.
Simon's Rock College
SVG native authoring
- Sodipodi (linux)
- Inkscape (linux)
- Sketsa (cross platform/java)
- Evolgraphix XStudio (Windows ???)
- Jasc WebDraw (Windows)
other non native, but export to svg
- Adobe Illustrator
- Adobe GoLive
- Corel suites
- Scribus (linux)
- etc
viewer
-Adobe SVG Viewer
-Corel SVG Viewer
-Apache Batik (Java)
-Mobiform
SVG library
-librsvg (linux)
-Apache Batik (Java)
-SharpVector (dotNet)
other info on SVG
-http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
someone care to add?
I didn't say it had to be "secret".
Well, just send an email, then. Seriously - the whole point of steganography is to hide data in the 'random' bits you get with compressed JPEGs. SVG is friggin' world-readble plain-text that's interpreted at the client (ok, that describes *any* data read by a client, but still).
Hiding messages in SVG is more ridiculous than redacting data in PDFs by placing a black box over the text.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
That's actually a very old method of passing messages. I can't remember the exact term for it, though. It's also the method used for the 'Bible Code', 'Cipher of Genesis', and other such quackery (you could do the same thing with the Curious George books, too, if the series were long enough :-).
What you do is have your msg. receiver(s) obtain a specific edition of some book (one which won't seem out of place with that individual). Next, prepare your message. Go through, letter by letter, and match them with 'random' letters (optionally after some other enciphering has been performed) from your book. Count down by line, over by letter, including spaces.
Now, you've got yourself a numerical ciphertext. Do some other post-processing - turn the string into BigDecimals, ROT-13 it, whatever. You can also count letters left-to right and/or bottom-to-top for fun. The important thing is that this all be established with the receiver, obviously.
Now, you just send the message. Use one-time pads for one last change. The book - together with all the other encoding steps - is your key. The receiver just deciphers the message by reversing the process. The more different steps, the more difficult the message will be to decipher.
But the book is the most important part of the key. If someone figures out all of the other steps, they've still got to figure which book (and edition) was used. I'm sure this method is still widely used. Very lo-fi.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
Just to clarify - you're sending the *key*. The message (*all* of your messages) is 'in plain sight', within the copy of Moby Dick over on the shelf.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
SVG examples made from Windows CAD programs
I can empathise with this; we've all concentrated on our breathing as children; love the socks one...
GrimRC
both these apps work on more than just linux. in fact from the SF stats the majority of users are win32 folks.
"MIDI could be re-invented to include wavelets which are a base representation of a voice (instrument or human) then define the mathmatical operations. You'd get a 99% facimilie that would probably pass as good as a low-quality MP3 at 1/0th the size."
Better yet, just do midi-style music with custom wav "instruments" rolled into the file. Oh wait, that's a tracker format!
So what you really want is a tracker format with some extra sparkly bits.
I want my Cowboyneal
- Macromedia loves SVG because they want to kill off that Flash format--no that's not right ...
...
- Uh, Microsoft loves SVG because it will obviate the need for XAML and make Longhorn, umm, stillborn--ah, wait a sec.
- Oh yeah, now Adobe, yeah Adobe! they got that great plug-in--never mind that the plug-in's moribund and Adobe's got to have a major internal conflict over SVG vs. PDF...
Tell me again _which_ major player is going to make SVG a roaring success ? ? ?
And, no, 'Mozilla' (or insert your favorite OSS project here) is not a valid answer.
OK, not a valid answer unless what you are really saying is that an OSS OS platform is (finally!) going to succeed on the desktop (client)--and before Longhorn becomes 'real'. That's a valid answer, but to a different question, IMHO.
(And for you conspiracy theorists out there, no, I _don't_ work for Microsoft. But I've been hearing that 'SVG' is the 'next big thing' in rendering for, oh about 5+ years now and the joke is beginning to wear a bit thin!)
That was a whole lot funnier than my post. You are saying that rendering hundreds of words of text all done with vectors is as fast? You are saying that you can render 1,000,000 vector objects faster (or just as fast) to the screen than a single raster formatted image?? Maybe if cached the final rastered result... but that's not vector anymore is it? Only in the most simplistic cases is vector rendering going to be faster(or nearly as fast). I suppose we can all simplify our desktops to get rid of the eye candy that will make SVG based desktops crawl... I do not see any information to support your position on this. In fact, history has show this to be incorrect, over and over again. With that said... anyone who knows me... knows that I am a champion of vector graphics development (and creator of vector based image editing applications). It is my preferred format. I like the end result, but it will never be the speedy desktop choice.