
To get in the groove of thinking about graphics I’m going to start with the concept of anti-aliasing. I use the SVGs on the web pages that make up this blog I need the PNG copies for posting on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn which don’t take SVGs, and also for some complex objects that would be too large as SVGs.
Convert the SVGs to PNGs in batches using ImageMagick. Write the graphic to a Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG). My graphics workflow for this blog is generally: Internet Explorer 8 was the last high-use browser of this sort we had to worry about.įor my blog I work almost purely with Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) format by choice, and PNG (a relatively efficient and high quality bitmap format) when I have to.
And until relatively recently many users’ web browsers could only show bitmap graphics. Generally vector formats are far superior if you have the choice but large complex graphics (eg with millions of points, or maps with many fiddly bits) can be slow to render (and large to store).
raster or bitmap graphics which are basically an array of numbers telling the computer which how to colour each pixel. Like something you generated with Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator. vector graphics, where the file is basically a set of instructions (start at x, draw a line at 30 degrees angle for y units, draw a circle of radius w centred at z, etc). There are two main types of computer graphic formats: As always, corrections and comments are very welcome. Caveat - the details of graphics formats and typefaces is not my area of real expertise, this blog post is me noting down things that I found useful and others might too. OK, no stats today, just fidgeting about with graphics devices and type faces.