[Kde-games-devel] SVG question

[Alan Horkan]

On Sun, 5 Nov 2006, Johann Ollivier Lapeyre wrote:

> 2006/11/5, Martin Heni <martin at heni-online.de >:
> >
> > Forgot another question on SVG:
> >
> > What tools do you use to "view" and "edit" SVG graphics? Anything you can
> > recommend?

In terms of testing and viewing I'd strongly recommend you run your SVG
past Batik which is considered to be a very high quality renderer.

It may not be convenient but checking things against the Adobe SVG Viewer
might be good too (may require other Operating System).

Since your target is KDE games the most important thing is to check
against KSVG which if I recall correctly is what Konqueror uses (both in
browser and file manager) but I expect you already know that.

> i edit them with inkscape. to view, konqueror for icons, and inkscape for
> larges one like kdegame stuff
>
> I dont plan to (re)draw them, but sometimes it might be handy to do minor
> > fixes to them.

I often like to use now defunct program called Jasc Web Draw.  The engine
supports more SVG functionality than the user interface (symbols) and it
has a really nice clean SVG output and allows for direct editing of the
source.  Unfortunately this leads to somewhat obsessive compulsive
behaviour only marginally better than creating SVG using a text editor.
(I really should try out a few Corel programs and see if the alternatives
are really alternatives and not just entirely different vector graphics
programs).  You wont find cleaner markup than the files I've producted
using Jasc Webdraw.

The simplicity of Webdraw is replicated in Karbon but unfortunately Karbon
is not suitable for most things, much as I might like it to be (so much so
that I contributed a few small patches.  Karbon and Krita are a large part
of what got me seriously interested in KDE).  Karbon has a whole lot
potential but not a whole lot of active developers.

Much like everyone else I use Inkscape, but I make sure to clear out
unused defines (the horribly named "Vacuum Defs") and make sure to save as
"Plain SVG" to avoid as much of the old sodipodi and Inkscape specific
cruft as possible (and if I were using Adobe I'd be trying to avoid their
junk markup too).

I've stopped even considering OpenOffice Draw since SVG support is little
more than an afterthought.

The inkscape wiki includes an extensive list of "Other Projects"
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/OtherProjects
which lists all kinds of programs from SVG renderers to drawing programs
which dont use SVG to animation software.


-- 
Alan Horkan
http://openclipart.org