Comments from a svg guru

[Vadim Plessky]

I'd like to comment on this part:
"SVG for icons is nice - but with SVG you can do much more and it should 
really have more weight within the KDE project!"

I fully agree that SVG should be considered *key technology* in KDE, and not 
only in KDE but in other Open-Source projects.
Note that Nautilus supports SVG "emblems" already for some time, and upcoming 
GTK 2.1 would support SVG natively (rendering is done via librsvg2).

So, in my opinion, SVG should be foundation of any Linux (UNIX) desktop, and 
'libsvg' (let's suppose that we have one unified SVG renderer/library) should 
be at the same level as libpng, libtiff, libmng.
It should be installed (and used) on all Desktop Linux systems.
Current variety of often incompatible SVG renderer heavily hurts progress with 
SVG adoption.

***
As about such specific application for SVG as SVG icons.
I think Desktop users would greatly benefit from SVG icons, as:
a) it saves disk space (modern icon theme can easily consume 10MB of disk 
space)
b) provides "new touch" to the images
Legacy bitmap icons, while can be very interesting & unique, often have 
*coarse* look & feel.
c)  it's posisble to *theme* icon themes, via external CSS stylesheet for SVG
(so, you can make 15 themes from just one, supposing that you have 
well-written SVG with CSS styling)

I also pleased to announce "alpha" release of BlueSphere SVG Icon theme.
You can download it from here:
http://freetype.newmail.ru/svg/BlueSphere-0.1.zip
(90KB compressed, about 60 SVG drawings)
I hope to build binaries (PNG) today and provide pre-rendered pixmap icon 
theme. Your comments are, of course, welcome!

Note that this is "work in progress", and some files have different version 
(2.0, 2.1, etc.)  You should use latest version in thi scase.
For the final release, i will delete old/unused stuff.

BTW: I hope Noatun users would be pleased with a new look ;-)

Regards,

Vadim

P.S. cc'ed kde-artists, may be artists have something to add :-)

On Thursday 31 October 2002 10:28 am, rwlbuis at xs4all.nl wrote:
|  Hi,
|
|  In light of recent svg discussions, I feel these words from a svg guru,
|  that were posted on the dot, are enlightening and should be discussed.
|  Cheers,
|
|  Rob.
|
|
|  Re: Nah, Crystal isn't SVG
|  by Andreas Neumann on Wednesday 30/Oct/2002, @22:15
|  To my opinion SVG is one of the best web-technologies to watch, as a
|  graphics-exchange format, as a graphics format for mobile devices, as a
|  printer description language (combined with other XML-technology, such as
|  XSL-FO), etc. ...
|
|  I therefore think that the KDE team should give SVG top priority as a
|  base-technology for the KDE-desktop (SVG enable all KDE-applications) and
|  as an integral part of the Konqueror browser. Combined with other XML
|  technology and scripting, SVG allows very useful applications and is for
|  the first-time a fully documented vendor-neutral graphics format as an
|  exchange format between different applications and platforms. I am very
|  happy that ksvg (svg.kde.org) already exists - but I think that it should
|  have more support and priority within the KDE team than it has now.
|
|  Check f.e. http://www.svgopen.org/, http://www.kevlindev.com/ and
|  www.carto.net to see some useful applications.
|
|  As a conclusion:
|  SVG for icons is nice - but with SVG you can do much more and it should
|  really have more weight within the KDE project!
|  ____________________________________
|  koffice mailing list
|  koffice at mail.kde.org
|  To unsubscribe please visit:
|  http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/koffice

-- 

Vadim Plessky
http://kde2.newmail.ru  (English)
33 Window Decorations and 6 Widget Styles for KDE
http://kde2.newmail.ru/kde_themes.html
KDE mini-Themes
http://kde2.newmail.ru/themes/

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