Date: Fri, 19 May 2000 12:27:09 +0100 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> Cc: doc@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Including images in the documentation Message-ID: <20000519122709.A95433@catkin.nothing-going-on.org> In-Reply-To: <20000509143555.A1692@kilt.nothing-going-on.org>; from nik@freebsd.org on Tue, May 09, 2000 at 02:35:57PM %2B0000 References: <20000509143555.A1692@kilt.nothing-going-on.org>
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[ I lost a message from someone in this thread who was re-asking about the
i18n in dia, and issues with SVG. If I don't answer them here, please
resend ]
On Tue, May 09, 2000 at 02:35:57PM +0000, Nik Clayton wrote:
> My preference is to store images in EPS and PNG formats in the repository,
> but *not* both at the same time. If it's a vector image (like a network
> diagram, for example) then it gets stored in EPS. If it's a bitmap then
> we can use PNG.
Discussion seems to have proved me wrong on this :-) My thanks for the
pointers to SVG, which I've been reading up about. Interested parties
can find more information about SVG at
http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8
(the '8' on the end is not a typo).
Executive summary is the SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is an XML DTD
for defining scalable vector graphic images.
I definitely think that SVG in the repository would be preferable to EPS,
and I'm still of the opinion that PNG is the better format for bitmap
images.
This begs two questions. First, how do we create SVG images, and second,
how do we convert these images to EPS and other formats?
I had high hopes for Dia, I really did. Sadly, someone's earlier assertion
that Dia uses SVG as its native format is false. Dia does save files in an
XML DTD, but it's not SVG -- it's private to Dia.
Dia can however export files as SVG. What it can't then do is re-import
them for editing. Technically, a transformation to map documents from
the Dia DTD to SVG and back again is possible, but I don't see any
implementations out there.
So, back to the drawing board (ho ho, sometimes I crack myself up :-) )
Enter "Sketch" (ports/graphics/sketch). This is Corel Draw-alike, written
in Python + Tk (!), that can read and write SVG files, and because it's
mostly Python, it's a doddle to extend it (should you be Python hacker, I'm
not). In particular, it already comes bundled with an sk2ps Python script
which can convert SVG documents to PS/EPS
sk2ps lion.svg lion.ps
is sufficient.
It's slimmer than Dia as well. Back of the envelope calculations show it
needing about 6MB of distfiles (which doesn't include the lumpen behemoth
that is X and TCL/Tk).
In the translation side of things, the interface appears to be readily
translateable -- the web site mentions French and Spanish translations
already.
However (and this might be a show stopper for us), currently it doesn't
support foreign language text *in the diagrams* very well. It uses Latin1
internally, and has no support for multi-byte characters yet. However,
that's on the ToDo list.
Thoughts?
N
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