[Clipart] clipart Digest, Vol 48, Issue 3

[John Olsen]

>
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 03 Mar 2008 09:57:00 +0200
> From: Nicu Buculei <nicu_gfx at nicubunu.ro>
> Subject: Re: [Clipart] [Open Clip Art Library] Some questions about
> 	SVG
> To: clipart at lists.freedesktop.org
> Message-ID: <47CBAF4C.90607 at nicubunu.ro>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
>
> noreply at openclipart.org wrote:
>> Hello,
>
> Hi,
>
>> I have recently joined the Open Clip Art community and I try to  
>> bring some vector drawings from time to time. I have some few  
>> questions about the SVG format.
>>
>> 1. As a professional designer I use Adobe Illustrator for my vector  
>> style drawings. I would like to make the SVG that I export for this  
>> site as good as possible, but sometimes I don't know which features  
>> can be used or not. I guess that some very specific Adobe features  
>> like gradient mesh or filters cannot be used in SVG. But I may use  
>> transparency or blur or shadow effect if I'm sure it can be  
>> compatible for SVG user.
>> I have checked the web to get some info about the SVG features not  
>> supported and I found these : http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Unsupported_SVG_Features
>> Do you have any other reference ?
>
> I am not an Illustrator user, but in my understanding, for some
> unsupported features (and this goes both way: Illustrator features not
> supported by SVG but also SVG features not implemented by  
> Illustrator),
> it will create them as embedded bitmaps.
>
> I do not know about a such a table of Illustrator features not  
> supported
> by the SVG standard, but I think it would be useful.
>
> In my experience, the SVG files produced by Illustrator are quite bad:
> they are bloated, will contain a lot of useless junk in "<i:pgf>"  
> chunks
> which have to be cleaned manually (think 2MB versus 20KB).


One needs to remember that Adobe Illustrator is a postscript drawing  
program and with the advent of CS is making PDF documents.  It just  
happens to be able to export to SVG.  For whatever reason, saving the  
document twice seems to cleanup a lot of the bloat.  Don't know why,  
but probably because AI like to hang on to legacy code so it can do  
all the undos.  Just reopen the svg and save as a new file.   Often  
get files up to 90% smaller.  Also save them with the "Preserve  
Illustrator editing ability" turned OFF.  This keeps out some of the  
bloat.

As an old dog trained in Illustrator, I use AI almost all the time for  
my files here.  I just like the way it handles objects and groups a  
lot better.  But I open them and do librarian fix-it work in  
Inkscape.   I would suggest having Inkscape around as a companion at  
least.  You'll see if there are problems and in outline mode you can  
see the tell tale boxes that are embedded bitmaps files.  If your  
Illustrator generated svg has those then it is not going to work as  
SVG standard.

John Olsen/Johnny Automatic