Image file format

Represents image pixel by pixel, rather than by mathematical primitives such as done in vector graphics:

Smaller files, scalable image size, and editability. Why would you use anything else for programmatically generated images?!?!

Companies have been really slow to support SVG features in their browsers, and that is very saddening: medium.com/@michaelmangial1/introduction-to-scalable-vector-graphics-6450c03e8d2e

You can't drop SVG support for canvas until there's a way to run untrusted JavaScript on the browser!

SVG does have some compatibility annoyances, notably SVG fonts. But we should as a society work to standardize and implement a fix those, the benefits of SVG are just too great!

Examples:

This is a pain point as of SVG 1.1...

Examples at svg/background.html which answers from stackoverflow.com/questions/11293026/default-background-color-of-svg-root-element/11293812:

This pain reflects directly on Inkscape: set SVG background color in Inkscape.

The major problem with SVG is text computer fonts. If you make an image with text that depends on one computer font and it is not present in the viewer's machine, it will use some other font, which may overlap with other elements of the image. Some libraries Matplotlib solve this by writing characters as curves, but this produces large files and unsearchable text. The inability of different computer platforms to standardize fonts that must always be present is a major issue.

TODO:

Dropped in favor of SVG 2.

PNG reference implementation. Ahh, if feels good to have a dominating open source reference implementation.

Demo of using it by Ciro Santilli: stackoverflow.com/questions/1362945/how-to-decode-a-png-image-to-raw-bytes-from-c-code-with-libpng/36399711#36399711

It's not super easy to use at first.

And it sometimes says that the basic drawing thing you want to do is off the project's scope.

But as you learn more about it and further generalize the concepts, there are often reasonable reasons for those design choices.

And the UI looks good :-)

Examples:

Some answers by Ciro Santilli:

Inkscape is a a good software for editing/creating SVG files.

Its functionality is fundamental for as a software for drawing geometry diagrams, as it is a good middle ground between algorithmic generation, and raster graphics.

At 1.0.2, its UI is a bit terrible:

And it crashes from time to time on Ubuntu 21.04. And it has some glaring bugs, e.g.:

But still, it is a very good initiative.

What would be really amazing is if they had constraints: gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/-/issues/1465 like proper CAD software, it would make it possible to not have to redo entire diagrams when you want to change a small part of them.

There's a tiny little crosshair that you can drag around to set the center of rotation.

And there's a button to make that crosshair snap: inkscape.org/forums/questions/can-a-pivotingtransfrom-crosshair-be-moved-and-made-to-snap-to-a-node-or-a-grid-point/#c14432

This is related to the underlying SVG pain point of SVG background color:

For PNG export: