[Clipart] clipart Digest, Vol 42, Issue 18

[Frederik Elwert]

Am Mittwoch, den 19.09.2007, 09:37 +0300 schrieb Nicu Buculei:
> The trick is: you have to put the PNG first and the SVG second in order 
> to have the PNG shown as thumbnail. If they are not in that order, use 
> "Manage Files" and "Up"/"Down"

While this works for now, I think it's not the best option. The PNG
files are *not* scalable, so one either has to export the PNG files with
the dimensions used by OCAL for thumbnails, or to rely on the resizing
capabilities of the browser, which are very different in quality.

In principal, SVG (as it's scalable) should be the better option for
thumbnails. But practically this brings some problems: Not all browsers
support the required SVG features (SVG filters in Firefox 2.x), and the
inkscape generated files lack some web-specific features (esp. viewBox
and no fixed width/height). The latter can be easily solved (I
implemented a solution as userJS that works fine for me and could be
added to the site as JS, but a PHP solution integrated in ccHost would
of course be preferable), the first is a matter of SVG support in
browsers. While Opera already supports filters and though nearly all SVG
files look good as thumbnails, Firefox will catch up with the upcoming
version 3.

So while I understand why to use PNG for thumbnails for now, I think
it's a bit odd to convert a scalable graphics format to a non-scalable
one in order to scale it to thumbnail size...

Cheers,
Frederik