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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

#51

Post by shatteredgate »

dnautics wrote: post #48
shatteredgate wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only one who dislikes S-expressions and prefers XML or JSON or even YAML? The parenthesis are way too confusing when editing manually and the format doesn't have enough semantic information to always correctly parse into common structures in any language besides lisp. I enjoy writing lisp myself but I really think it is a mistake to use them for common formats everywhere that I've seen it tried.

seriously, it shouldn't be so hard to write a parser that compiles your favorite text format to TVG, or even to the lispy text format.

IMO that defeats the purpose of using this format if you have to write things to compile to it. If you do that you might as well just compile to the binary format since you won't be editing your canonical representation anyway. I'd imagine with image formats you'd want to pick a format that is the easiest possible thing to parse and consume while not harming it's "editableness" and I don't think S-expressions fit that bill.

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

#52

Post by jabbany »

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.

Franky somebody should do like a TinyDF replacement for pdf... That's also a somewhat bloated format at this point.

Ideally though, the tiny* formats should be forward compatible (?) and interpretable as a valid non-Tiny* document. That would be quite nice for wider adoption (like JSON).

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

#53

Post by ARandomerDude »

pupppet wrote: post #5

I have to install a plugin to allow my WP sites to support SVG because they can potentially contain scripting, what a pain in the ass. All we wanted was vector images, what we got was vector images and a couple kitchen sinks. Bring on the alternatives.

Also, don't use WordPress. It sucks.

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

#54

Post by shatteredgate »

adgjlsfhk1 wrote: post #46
exabrial wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"XML is bad" is still one of the worst engineering arguments. Why is it bad? What is the tradeoff? Things that are bad are easy to quantify as they're measurable. What does it have? It has strong schema support built in. Any intelligent IDE allows for cmd-space completion by reading the XSD. I don't buy this argument as full XML parsers are not even as complicated as HTML5 parsers, which nobody seems to have an issue…

XML is bad because it bloats the size by roughly 3x (compared to other text formats like s-exprs), is difficult to implement properly. HTML is bad too, we're just more stuck with it so it's less useful to complain.

The size is not really an issue for any compression algorithm. I've seen quite a few small XML parsers that don't bother with the full spec and only implement a subset.

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

#55

Post by jancsika »

> How will this look in different browsers? Let's test!

obviously different font widths for rendering of SVG text in different browsers/font stacks

> That didn't go as expected. I thought that at least both files on my Linux machine look the same, but it seems like Firefox doesn't like the font-size specification, while Chrome and Edge do.

I asked the Render-A-Webpage-As-An-SVG-framework guy about this last week. He claimed over multiple years he hasn't had a single report of broken text rendering from users of his framework.

So what's the deal? Are OP and me the only devs who have ever hit up against this issue in practice?

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

#56

Post by [deleted] »

jancsika wrote: post #55

> How will this look in different browsers? Let's test! obviously different font widths for rendering of SVG text in different browsers/font stacks > That didn't go as expected. I thought that at least both files on my Linux machine look the same, but it seems like Firefox doesn't like the font-size specification, while Chrome and Edge do. I asked the Render-A-Webpage-As-An-SVG-framework guy about this last week. He…

[deleted]

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

#57

Post by IshKebab »

dosshell wrote: post #20
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.

I have heard very good words about the eps format from a vector-format nerd (he reads file format specifikation books because its fun). I would love to here more opinions about eps from other developers. How does eps really compare with the other formats mentioned above?

I can't imagine those good words ever came from anyone that has actually used it.

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

#58

Post by ikskuh »

exabrial wrote: post #43
ikskuh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"XML is bad" is still one of the worst engineering arguments. Why is it bad? What is the tradeoff? Things that are bad are easy to quantify as they're measurable. What does it have? It has strong schema support built in. Any intelligent IDE allows for cmd-space completion by reading the XSD. I don't buy this argument as full XML parsers are not even as complicated as HTML5 parsers, which nobody seems to have an issue…

XML is bad for TinyVG as it is too large in several regards. XML kinda requires DOM parsing, XML is a text format (so inefficient encoding) and XML parsers need to be large so they can be called XML parsers.

All of these properties contradict a embedded world where you can render vector graphics from 32k RAM on a chip that doesn't even have enough memory for a framebuffer itself.

Also implementation complexity of XML is so high that i gave up on impementing a correct parser. I don't want to have a half-assed parser that cannot parse XML, but only "XML light" and making this is a huge amount of work which i don't want to waste in my leisure time

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

#60

Post by jancsika »

pupppet wrote: post #5

I have to install a plugin to allow my WP sites to support SVG because they can potentially contain scripting, what a pain in the ass. All we wanted was vector images, what we got was vector images and a couple kitchen sinks. Bring on the alternatives.

FYI-- if a user right clicks to "View Image" on an SVG, the new tab will run any scripts contained in the SVG.
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