[Clipart] Mac osX version

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Jean-Francois Maheux <MycroftMath at hotmail.com> writes:

> Is it possible to use Openclipart on mac OSX ?  

It should be...  theoretically.

> What should I download ???

You can download either the .zip or the .tar.gz version of the clipart
package, and unpack it on OS X.  Depending on your setup, it *might*
automatically be unpacked into a folder.  If not, OS X comes with
command-line utilities for unpacking both of those formats.  (It might
come with one for bzip2 also, but I'm not sure about that.)

Once you get it unpacked, you'll find subfolders for different
categories (and some of the categories have subcategories, and so on).
In each folder, there will be (at least) three files for each image.
One is the .svg file, which you can open in any program that supports
the SVG standard (more on that in a moment).  Another is a .png bitmap
graphic of the image, rendered 80 pixels wide.  (Some of those are
more useful than others, depending on the scale of the image.  They're
intended as thumbnails, to make it easy to preview the images, but
some of the thumbnails are useful as they stand.)  The third file,
with the .txt extension, is just some extra info about the file, such
as the author and stuff.  (That information is also contained embedded
in the SVG.)

While the .png files may be useable for some images, you probably will
ultimately want something that can open the .svg files.  These are
vector graphics, so you can use them at whatever size you like, and
they'll scale -- e.g., you can render one at 1024 pixels wide, and it
won't pixelate and look like Lego blocks.  

Some of us on the list are using Inkscape, but I am not sure how easy
it would be to get Inkscape running on OS X.  It requires GTK2, which
has significant dependencies, so (in addition to installing the free
developer tools and X server from Apple) you might have to spend some
hours tracking down various libraries it depends on.  (I know it's
possible, though, because there are people running Gimp on Mac.)
If you do want to go this route, you might start by looking here:
http://gtk-osx.sourceforge.net/

Sodipodi also requires GTK, so it wouldn't be any easier to get
running than Inkscape, probably.

There are, however, other programs that can open SVGs.

* Adobe makes a viewer for them, that I have heard about but never
  tried -- it's only a viewer, not an editor but I *think* this is
  freely available, and being Adobe it should be easy enough to
  install on OS X, I would think.  Try looking here:
  http://www.adobe.com/svg/main.html

* Adobe Illustrator is also supposed (so I've heard) to be able to
  open SVG images.  That one is, of course, decidedly not free.
  
* I think there's an SVG viewer/converter written in Java.  Batik, it
  might be called.  I don't know anything else about it.  Java, of
  course, is freely available from Sun Microsystems and runs on 
  Mac OS X just fine, no problem there.

* There are various command-line programs available for converting SVG
  to PNG or other formats.  Some folks here were recently talking
  about librsvg or something like that, and also I think there was
  another one too, the name of which I have forgotten. 

* It might be possible to get a Mac OS X build of Mozilla, Firefox, or
  Camino that supports SVG.  (The standard builds don't, though.)

There may be other options too.  These are just ones I know about.

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