[pdftex] Re: Best bitmap image format?

[gnwiii at gmail.com]

On 2/27/06, Olivier Lefevre <lefevrol at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > The rush is, however, _ON_ to support more image metadata (like geotiff).
>
> That sounds more like a job for SVG but it doesn't look like SVG is
> going anywhere useful: even Adobe (its main sponsor) canot muster the
> will to finish its SVG viewer.

1) Adobe has to be careful about stepping on toes.  The free software
community does not care about toes, and SVG support is at about the
level PDF support was at the same age (simple stuff works, but there
are lots of bugs to find and sort).
In my view, many of the problems for vector graphics come from the
need in the real world to support the Win32 graphics model.  SVG draws
heavily on the PS/PDF model and translation of PS/PDF to Win32 vector
graphics is a hard problem, and SVG does add bells and whistles that
make implementation a bigger task.

2) The hardware you need to run Win32 with virus checking can easily
deal with images, and disks are cheap, so there is less interest in
vector formats now than
a few years ago.  The main reason PDF's aren't all just image content
is that you can't search for strings in images.

I just did a couple (simple line art) figures with inkscape SVG.  We
needed to use them in a PowerPoint presentation, so I imported into
OpenOffice.org draw and saved as windows emf.  Some touchup was needed
after the import.  The emf's looked fine on my XP Pro SP2 PC, but font
spacing was a mess on a supposedly identical PC with XP Pro in the
"departmental standard" configuration, so in the end we used PNG
images.

--
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia