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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. "

6 of 17 comments (clear)

  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.

  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. 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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