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TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

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Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#21

Post by nigeltao »

pcwalton wrote: post #7

There are many other popular vector graphics formats beyond those mentioned here. Lottie has already displaced SVG for animation/motion graphics, and for static content IconVG exists and is backed by Google. There's also PDF, PostScript, Flash, the glyf format in OpenType, etc.

IconVG author here. Happy to discuss.

Animation is issue #2 on https://github.com/google/iconvg and I have some ideas but no code yet. I'm also midway through changing the current "version 0" format into a "version 1" format, dropping things like the ArcTo op (inspired by SVG) precisely with one eye on (future) animation support. The ArcTo large-arc-flag, like any boolean-typed value, is impossible to interpolate smoothly.

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#22

Post by ikskuh »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #19

While I do appreciate the thought process and hard work, it does maybe feel like the most of the benefits could be obtained with a strict subset of SVG instead - something like SVG Tiny was meant to be, but with fewer bad decisions! That would allow for compatibility with the existing ubiquitous SVG ecosystem.

The problem with that is that you still need to implement a full XML parser. Even if you strip out any CSS and ECMAScript, it will still require the complexity of XML with all it's gloryness and escapiness and ambigious defines.

And even if we rely only on XML, we get the DOM and hierarchical structures. If we forbid those, we have as a file format and people will look weird because their other SVG won't be supported in there.

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#24

Post by pcwalton »

nigeltao wrote: post #21
pcwalton wrote: post #7

There are many other popular vector graphics formats beyond those mentioned here. Lottie has already displaced SVG for animation/motion graphics, and for static content IconVG exists and is backed by Google. There's also PDF, PostScript, Flash, the glyf format in OpenType, etc.

IconVG author here. Happy to discuss. Animation is issue #2 on https://github.com/google/iconvg and I have some ideas but no code yet. I'm also midway through changing the current "version 0" format into a "version 1" format, dropping things like the ArcTo op (inspired by SVG) precisely with one eye on (future) animation support. The ArcTo large-arc-flag, like any boolean-typed value, is impossible to interpolate smo…

IMO as long as animation isn't tied to After Effects like Lottie is, you can't go wrong. The fact that the most popular open vector animation format is tied to an expensive, proprietary piece of software that isn't even primarily a vector art package makes me very sad…

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#25

Post by ikskuh »

BudaDude wrote: post #9

Excluding animations kills this for me . We need more SVG animations on the web. But the state of animation in SVG is a headache unless your using a third party library .

TinyVG is not meant to ever support animations, but should be used in all places where this is not required.

So if you want to use animation for everything, you could design a secondary format that allows animation of TinyVG files hint

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#26

Post by ikskuh »

mmcgaha wrote: post #18

For simple image generation, nothing beats SVG or EPS. For years, these two technologies have let me add cool stuff to PDFs and web pages without the need for expensive/complex/insecure libraries. It is going to be pretty hard to beat the ease of generating these formats.

Then you should check out the TinyVG text format:

(tvg 1 (32 32 1/1 u8888 reduced) ( (1 0 0) ) ( (fill_polygon (flat 0) ( (16 0) (32 32) (0 32) )) ) )

This draws you a tiny triangle. The only problem you'll get is when doing text, but for SVG: These wouldn't be portable anyways

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#27

Post by hutzlibu »

jlarocco wrote: post #13
BudaDude wrote: post #9

Excluding animations kills this for me . We need more SVG animations on the web. But the state of animation in SVG is a headache unless your using a third party library .

> We need more SVG animations on the web. Do we, though? We've already had animated GIFs, the marquee tag, Java applets, and Flash animation, and they've all died out because 99.9% of the time the animation is obnoxious and terrible. Vector animation would be just as annoying.

GIFs are horrible in terms of memory.

Java applets died out of technical reasons (and was replaced by flash)

Flash died, because it was proprietary and Adobe did not open it up. (and flash was vector animation btw.)

Otherwise it surely would still be around. And in a way it is, as you can export flash animations to the html canvas element. And some people do that (with quirks)

In other words, a simple, but powerful vector animation tool, is very much needed. The current state is a mess.

And you probably do not like vector animated advertisement, or websites that use animations for the sake of animations. Sure, no one wants that.

But how about games, or interactive graphic to for example show complex data in context to some map? Or animations for didactic purposes? Cartoons?

A animation well done is actually one, you do not notice. (but you would notice, if it was missing)

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#29

Post by __m »

jlarocco wrote: post #13
BudaDude wrote: post #9

Excluding animations kills this for me . We need more SVG animations on the web. But the state of animation in SVG is a headache unless your using a third party library .

> We need more SVG animations on the web. Do we, though? We've already had animated GIFs, the marquee tag, Java applets, and Flash animation, and they've all died out because 99.9% of the time the animation is obnoxious and terrible. Vector animation would be just as annoying.

That’s a bit revisionist history. Flash was pretty popular and animations haven’t gone away.

Re: TinyVG: A challenger to the throne of vector graphics

#30

Post by ShrigmaMale »

ikskuh wrote: post #14
ComputerGuru wrote: post #4

Really cool work - I've been looking for something like this for some time and have played around with HVIF and IVG to that end. @ikskuh since I see you here in the comments, I have one nitpick: I don't think it's fair to compare your binary format to an uncompressed SVG file since they are most often used online (and often used even offline) as gzip- or brotli-compressed resources. It would be nice to see an additio…

Yes, i've heard it from some people already. Will add this to the benchmark tomorrow. It's late here in germany and running the benchmark takes roughly 30 minutes already. With gzip, i expect it to go up to 45 or 60 minutes, as we all want good compression rates!

Also is the svg itself optimized? Usually possible to take a lot off them with tool like svgomg: https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/
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