General > General Technical Chat
Help identifying an OLD font?
TerraHertz:
--- Quote from: Domagoj T on June 07, 2020, 01:23:06 pm ---You can scale vector graphics as you please.
Zoom in on the penguin (and letters), it stays all pretty. A raster image, such as PNG would get pixelated.
--- End quote ---
Did you assume I didn't know that? Good grief...
My question should have been, who cares? It's a web graphic, of no particular importance either intrinsic or historical. Scaling it down, it stays fine. Up, for huge displays... Hmm, complaining about pixelation in that case seems to me like the visual equivalent of audiophoolery. Perfectionism for no practical benefit.
As opposed to attempting to accurately represent some media of actual historical interest, where there's a duty to have the electronic representation faithfully reproduce what the eye would see when looking at the original media from long ago.
But if you zoomed right in on the original media, you'd see ink on paper irregularities, or image screening dots. So what's wrong with seeing pixelation on a digitally created image? It's a perfectly valid artistic choice, to allow pixelation as an intrinsic feature of the work. Of course it's also a valid choice to spend a lot of time creating an infinitely zoomable vector-based image.
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: TerraHertz on June 08, 2020, 12:41:43 pm ---So what's wrong with seeing pixelation on a digitally created image? It's a perfectly valid artistic choice, to allow pixelation as an intrinsic feature of the work.
--- End quote ---
Like I mentioned, I don't like the scaling effects. It's not just pixelation: browsers use nearest-neighbor scaling, which introduces defects that poke me in the eye.
--- Quote from: TerraHertz on June 08, 2020, 12:41:43 pm ---Of course it's also a valid choice to spend a lot of time creating an infinitely zoomable vector-based image.
--- End quote ---
Huh? :o For me, it was definitely faster to do Tux in Inkscape, than it would've been in Gimp or Photoshop.
I am not a graphic artist, but I do have done that work, too. For example, in 1997 I created the very first set of collector cards for the Finnish Defence Forces; purely PR stuff. Used a classic Mac for that: Photoshop (4.0, IIRC) for the photo editing and touchups, Macromedia Freehand (7.0, IIRC) for the layout and diagrams and text on the backside.
Do note that the SVG stuff is just 90k or so, and it is already loaded when the page loads; no separate TCP connection for the image. That means it loads faster than if the image was in a separate file. All in all, incorporating SVG into the HTML is simply superior to using a JPEG or PNG image instead, for this kind of content. Photos are a completely different matter, of course.
If I would get off my butt and implement it, I could make Tux have Crazy Eyes, following the mouse cursor, with just a few lines of Javascript on top.
tooki:
--- Quote from: TerraHertz on June 08, 2020, 12:41:43 pm ---
--- Quote from: Domagoj T on June 07, 2020, 01:23:06 pm ---You can scale vector graphics as you please.
Zoom in on the penguin (and letters), it stays all pretty. A raster image, such as PNG would get pixelated.
--- End quote ---
Did you assume I didn't know that? Good grief...
My question should have been, who cares? It's a web graphic, of no particular importance either intrinsic or historical. Scaling it down, it stays fine. Up, for huge displays... Hmm, complaining about pixelation in that case seems to me like the visual equivalent of audiophoolery. Perfectionism for no practical benefit.
--- End quote ---
That SVG is small, and as he said, embedded in the HTML so loads super fast. A PNG large enough to look good on large high-res displays (like 4K) would be much larger, and shrinking that down on smaller displays would mean much more “wasted” data — and for an inferior result!
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 08, 2020, 01:02:08 pm ---
--- Quote from: TerraHertz on June 08, 2020, 12:41:43 pm ---So what's wrong with seeing pixelation on a digitally created image? It's a perfectly valid artistic choice, to allow pixelation as an intrinsic feature of the work.
--- End quote ---
Like I mentioned, I don't like the scaling effects. It's not just pixelation: browsers use nearest-neighbor scaling, which introduces defects that poke me in the eye.
--- End quote ---
No they don’t, and haven’t for many years — unless you specifically ask for it with the image-rendering: pixelated CSS style.
amyk:
--- Quote from: tooki on June 09, 2020, 05:00:26 pm ---That SVG is small
--- End quote ---
SVG is one of the worst vector graphics formats around. It's like they wanted to XML-ize everything, but that would be even more bloated, so ended up sticking PostScript/PDF-ish commands inside XML elements. A SWF of the same content would probably be 1/10th the size.
Nominal Animal:
--- Quote from: tooki on June 09, 2020, 05:00:26 pm ---
--- Quote from: Nominal Animal on June 08, 2020, 01:02:08 pm ---Like I mentioned, I don't like the scaling effects. It's not just pixelation: browsers use nearest-neighbor scaling, which introduces defects that poke me in the eye.
--- End quote ---
No they don’t, and haven’t for many years — unless you specifically ask for it with the image-rendering: pixelated CSS style.
--- End quote ---
You're right; I should've written "used", when I first started doing this in 2008 or so, and some still did when I created my version of Tux in SVG a few years back.
(In 2008, I had to embed the SVG, have a VML fallback if SVG is not supported, and a PNG/JPEG/GIF backup if that is not supported either. It wasn't fun to do as it needed a lot of hand-fixing details, but the results were much superior to just using an image. Did that for an Uni department, for the logo.)
While SVG is quite verbose, it is a format you can produce from any programming language – and I often write helper scripts to blurt out SVG images of 3D shapes I'm interested in –, including Javascript; and when incorporated in the HTML, you can modify the SVG just as easily as you can modify HTML elements, for animation and such. It itself is a compromise, so not optimal for any particular purpose, but for purposes of the web, as a vector graphics interchange format, it works damn well. The other alternatives (VML, PGML) were worse. (My own machine doesn't have software to play/display SWF at all – I don't need or want the security holes –, and claiming SWF is better is just silly.)
I am surprised by the objections to using SVG. Interesting.
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