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Open Clip Art Library Announces 0.8 Release

Posted by timothy on from the add-scribus-and-stir dept.

jonadab writes "The Open Clip Art Library project (hosted at freedesktop.org) is announcing their first widely-publicized release, dubbed 0.8, containing over two and a half thousand unique vector images (in SVG format), sorted into categories. All of the images are released into the public domain and may be used as royalty-free clipart. You can browse the collection through the web interface or download the entire thing as a gzipped tarball. (Mirrors are welcome.) The library is also always soliciting more contributions, and holiday-themed images would be particularly appropriate this time of year. Thanks to everyone who has contributed artwork to the library already. "

17 comments

  1. Nice... by chochos · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I just browsed a couple of categories. Some very nice images there.

    I downloaded some, and I just realized I don't have any application installed to watch SVG's in my Mac. Does anyone know of a SVG viewer for Mac? And perhaps a converter? I can really use some of these images on a couple of OmniGraffle diagrams that I'm working on...

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    1. Re:Nice... by DemENtoR · · Score: 4, Informative

      Try the adobe SVG viewer (also works on mac) http://www.adobe.com/svg/overview/whatsnew.html

    2. Re:Nice... by Spoing · · Score: 5, Informative
      1. I downloaded some, and I just realized I don't have any application installed to watch SVG's in my Mac. Does anyone know of a SVG viewer for Mac? And perhaps a converter? I can really use some of these images on a couple of OmniGraffle diagrams that I'm working on...

      Take a look at Inkscape in the Fink ports repository;

      1. List of ported graphics tools in Fink.

        The Fink Inkscape page (booring but functional).

      Inkscape will import or save/export a few common formats. A couple other programs in the list also handle SVG.

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    3. Re:Nice... by trendyhendy · · Score: 4, Informative

      Also, there is the Java-based Batik toolkit for displaying, manipulating, and transcoding SVG images. It can be used for converting SVG images into jpegs, etc. You might want to give ImageMagick a go; I'm not sure if it supports SVG.

    4. Re:Nice... by Gorath99 · · Score: 1
      You might want to give ImageMagick a go; I'm not sure if it supports SVG.

      It does, but rather poorly. It seems to convert any vector images to bitmaps, even if you just want to convert one vector format to another (say svg to eps).
    5. Re:Nice... by pruss · · Score: 1

      Let me second the Batik recommendation. It has excellent quality output. I've had some problems with stuff that referenced external fonts, but I converted the fonts into svg format, and it was fine then (apart maybe from lack of hinting).

  2. Great, combined with OOo by northcat · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I used to find OpenOffice lacking of clip-arts. This will make a great combination with OO. (I haven't used OO for a while, so if OO has many clip-arts now, please excuse me). I used to think open source is lagging in the graphics department, but its nice to see advancements like this.

  3. Free SVG editor for Windows? by Nyenyec · · Score: 1
    Can anyone recommend a free SVG editor for Windows?

    I tried Inkscape 0.39 but it crashes on me all the time.

    Thanks,
    Nyenyec

    1. Re:Free SVG editor for Windows? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I think irfanview might have an extension for SVG viewing. One can use irfanview for any image format, most video formats, and most audio formats.

  4. Have you tried a nightly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Theres a link from the downloads page of inkscape to nightly windows builds, the bug may well be fixed in the cvs version. (the 0.40 release is not far off) If it still crashes I'd encourage you to file a bug, as the inkscape devs are mainly linux guys so rely on the userbase to let them know of any issues on windows.

  5. Cool by cuteseal · · Score: 1
    Awesome! Should be good for web designers out there.

    On a separate note, so typical of open-sourc-y type people to choose some snazzy but obscure format to distribute their stuff. Why not gif or png? :(

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    1. Re:Cool by jonadab · · Score: 5, Insightful

      > On a separate note, so typical of open-sourc-y type people to choose some
      > snazzy but obscure format to distribute their stuff. Why not gif or png? :(

      Thumbnails in PNG format are included for each image, but PNG is a _bitmapped_
      format, so it's not appropriate for _vector_ graphics. (Converting a vector
      graphic to a bitmapped format is a lossy operation; you can't go back and
      change your mind about how big you wanted the image to be. The difference
      between PNG and SVG is like the difference between Photoshop and Illustrator.)

      The only other widely supported vector formats I know about are WMF,
      Illustrator's format, or the source formats for various raytracers. The
      latter are mostly obscure (except maybe POV) and require specific software
      and usually quite a lot of CPU time to render. They're great for rendering
      wickedly cool 3D scenes, but they're not a good format choice for clipart.

      WMF or Illustrator formats could have been used, but SVG was chosen because
      it is a W3C standard (so _theoretically_ should within a decade or thereabouts
      be supported directly by most browsers; there is little chance that WMF or
      Illustrator formats will ever be supported by browsers) and also because it
      supports embedded metadata for keeping track of the author and stuff.

      If someone wants to distribute packages of rendered PNG versions at a larger
      size than the thumbnails, that would be acceptable. There are tools that
      can automatically batch-render the SVG images to PNGs -- the project uses
      such tools to generate the thumbnails. Long-term, we would prefer that
      applications develop support for SVG, since it is a W3C standard and also
      because the ability to resize images without having them pixelate is very
      useful -- and, indeed, many applications have this on their TODO lists and
      just haven't gotten around to it yet, or in some cases (such as Mozilla)
      haven't got it debugged enough to include in the main releases, although
      it's available as an option at compile time -- but packages of pre-rendered
      bitmapped graphics would be useful in the short term for use with apps that
      do not support SVG right now. However, those would only be just that --
      prerendered bitmaps. We still need to keep the SVG source images, because
      those are the ones that can be scaled to any resolution and have the metadata.

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    2. Re:Cool by arose · · Score: 1

      Not that obscure. Why would you rather have a 256 color bimtmat format (GIF) rather than a complete vector format?

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    3. Re:Cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      The only other widely supported vector formats I know about are WMF, Illustrator's format, or the source formats for various raytracers.

      The most popular clip-art format has traditionally been encapsulated postscript (EPS). Admittedly, Microsoft products have had hit-or-miss support for that. Another popular format had been WordPerfect Graphics (.WPG), though that has mostly fallen by the wayside. A well-standardized format is the Computer Graphics Metafile (.CGM). It actually has widespread support and would be a good candidate.

      For the future, SVG is a good choice but CGM would be a great alternate format for the transitional times, like today.

  6. artistic programmers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I worked for a year on a GUI for aa windows-app. Found myself bean torn apart by programmer to artists all the time as our graphics-artist wasn't officialy hired by the company thus not so commited.

    I personaly have a thing for graphics, but let me tell you this. If you state that your skills aren't all that, you're probably wasting tons of time generating this art you're not too pleased with.

    So I can give you two advices:

    1. either decide that you want to develope this artistic side of yours and then read the rest of the posts for some tutorial/mini-course/etc on graphics.

    2. decide that you want to focus on what you like, which is programming so it sounds, and find somebody to outsource your icons/sprites to. You're surely to find some art-school student or kid that would love to do some 'official' work on some 'project' for some $, it shouldn't cost you that much cause you're not paying a studio of god knows what, and you're bound to get better results than what you've scrubbed up until now, according to your statements :-)

  7. it's down :( by signingis · · Score: 1

    That's no good. I was hoping for some OOo clipart goodness.

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