[Clipart] RE: Abi-Clipart - Vectoize question ?

[Nicu Buculei]

Gerald Ganson wrote:
> I was browsing around on WIKI this afternoon, and found the link to
> Abi-Clipart.
> They obviously get a fair amount of content from OpenClipart.

I guess this is the URL: http://www.ibiblio.org/abiclipart/index.html

> I don't know much about PNG and file formats etc, but it appears that
> many of their PNG files are not, and have never been, vectors.

I don't closely follow Abiword development, but 2.2 introduced initial 
support for SVG import (which was rasterized in the import process) and 
promised full support in future.
Considering this, i believe they will have no problem using SVG as the 
default format for images.

> Just wondering though. Since they also list all the clips as public
> domain, is  
> it a good idea to possibly vectorize some of these files at some point
> and 
> submit them as SVG to open clipart ?

Sure it is possible. The drawings you are talking about are mostly black 
and white and are not very hard to vectorize. Here is a quick example 
traced automatically with Inkscape (potrace):
http://clipart.nicubunu.ro/tracing/tracedabiclipart.png

If you ask my opinion, I think we can join forces and collaborate at 
least in using the same classification for categories (keywords) or 
packaging format.
Of course, here is also the "high sky" goal of a common master 
repository for images and the hypothetic gtk+ clipart browser mentioned 
some months ago.

-- 
nicu