[Clipart] Bounding boxes in adobe and Graphic Converter?

[Stephen Silver]

Nick Macdonald wrote:

> Hi - I hope this is the right forum to raise this issue in - I am  
> having some issues with clip art from openclipart.org on Mac OS X. An  
> example is the file cloud_r.svg from the callouts section.
> 
> It opens fine in inkscape, Seamonkey, Firefox and Gimp, but in Adobe  
> for Safari, and Graphic Converter, the file is clipped to 400x400,  
> and the rest discarded. I raised this issue with the author of  
> graphic converter, and he says that the file is faulty, and, indeed,  
> looking at the text of the file it does seem to declare the height  
> and width as 400 in the first few lines - do you have any ideas about  
> this?

This is an Inkscape bug.  The problem is that the image is declared
to be 400pt x 400pt (1pt being a point, 1/72 of an inch).  Everything
in the image itself is measured in pixels, so any viewer that assumes
a different pixel/point ratio than Inkscape will not display the image
as intended - it will either be cropped or have too much empty space
around it.  There is no standard for the number of points per pixel,
so these Inkscape images are not portable.

One way to fix this is to add a viewBox attribute that specifies
how the image should be scaled to fit the given width and height.
An alterative fix is to replace the specified width and height
with the equivalent width and height in pixels, using Inkscape's
assumed pixel/point ratio for the conversion.

-- 
Stephen Silver