SVG : Java Glossary

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) ’s file format for exchanging images stored as vectors an opposed to pixels. Eventually it might become for images what HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is for text, a way of compactly sending images around the Internet to be displayed in browsers. It is officially recommended by W3C. It uses XML (extensible Markup Language) to mathematically describe an image. For example, the following .svg file renders as a ladybug.

You can see how it handles gradients. The XML file specifies the colours at various intermediate points and the rendering engine interpolates.

Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw(read only), Sodipodi, Sketch and Kontour support svg files. The Gimp does not. Opera browser will render them on the command line or in <img tags, allowing you to scale them up as big as you want, then capture them as png files with FastStone.

SVG files are human readable. The guts are path outlines that look like this:

d="M 710.02068,860.16801 C 709.57268,859.46101 708.50468,857.49601 707.64668,855.80101 C 636.85368,836.56301 635.92468,832.74901 630.99668,791.75201 L 608.71968,526.52201 L 770.43268,801.21901 C 766.05068,801.80101 765.19968,802.31501 763.84468,805.20501 C 761.61568,809.96101 760.39168,815.07001 758.07768,829.28901 C 755.75768,843.54901 754.77268,845.88501 748.56768,851.86701 …L 710.02068,860.16801 z"

M x,y means moveto
L x,p means lineto
C x,y,x1,y1,x2,y2 means absolute curveto

FastStone
gif
graph
How SVG paths work
Image
ImageIO
jpg
pixel
png
SVG specification
vector
W3C

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