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[ <AndrewWatt2000@aol.com>]
> OK, I admit it ... I don't have a really plausible reason for asking the
> question at this particular moment in time, but I would be interested to
know
> what people on this list (which presumably largely excludes the core SVG
> geeks) are using SVG for at the moment?
>
> If you are not using SVG, but have considered it, I would be interested in
> the principal reasons (assuming that somewhere there is a graphic end
point
> in your XML workflow) that caused you to defer using SVG or decide against
> using it?
I am not using SVG right now but I have used it on two different jobs about
a year ago. In both cases, I was doing numerical data processing and needed
to graph or plot some of the results. In ine case, I had my data in xml
files or could easily get it into xml files, and I used xslt to produce the
SVG graphs. In the other case, I was producing the data using Python, and I
used Python to write the SVG.
In both jobs, once I got things working, I produced a lot of SVG using
batch-like processes. In some cases, I also captured typeical screen shots
and pasted them into Powerpoint presentations - don't laugh, it was by far
the easiest way.
It was a bit hard to climb the learning curve to the point that I could get
all the different pieces of the graphs coordinated and placed correctly
relative to each other. Fortunately, I had quite a lot of Postscript
experience from years ago - I probably would have used Postscript if SVG was
not around.
I was very happy I could use SVG and liked it much better than working with
Postscript - although PS can do a lot more or at least it is easier to
figure out how (bear in mind that I did a lot of FORTH programming in my
earlier days). But SVG is missing one capability that really gets in the
way of using it in complex applications, so far as I am concerned. That is
the lack of font metrics. You cannot find out how big any piece of text is,
so you cannot programatically line many things up, you cannot properly break
lines, etc. I hope that the SVG language experts have or will figure out a
way to deal with that, because I think it is essential.
The other thing I noticed is that the anti-aliasing took away too much
sharpness from the images, at least with the Adobe viewer. I would like to
be able to adjust the balance of anti-aliasing and sharpness.
Cheers,
Tom P
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