SVG in 3?

[Michael Ashton]

On Thursday, March 20, 2003, at 10:58  PM, Listera wrote:

> "Michael Ashton" wrote:
>
>> I want SVG export.
>
> Where do you use it?

First use is web pages. SVG looks much nicer and often takes less space 
than bitmaps for many of the kinds of drawings I do - well, if it 
doesn't always take less space, it gives more bang for the byte, if 
you'll pardon the expression. This is useful to me right now.

Second use is more for the future (pie-in-the-sky?). I dream of a 
document production system where I can take source files in text-based 
formats, process them through processing software, and wind up with 
beautiful documents or web pages that look just as I want them to. With 
the right combination of modern buzzwords and TLAs - XSL, SVG, MathML 
(I do engineering-type documents) - it might just work.

Now, the great thing about SVG, as opposed to OmniGraffle files, is 
that SVG is a common, open format, and it's already widely supported. 
It's XML, so reasonably easy to read and write with programs; 
everybody's agreed on what it means and how it works; and therefore it 
has a good chance of outliving OmniGraffle's file format. So I want to 
make drawings, put them in an archivable, cross-platform format, and 
release them to the cruel world. SVG seems like a reasonable way to do 
this.

LaTeX is great, and offers much of this sort of thing right now, but 
it's too hard to make its output look like I want it to. None of the 
LaTeX tools really play nice with modern stuff like PostScript and PDF. 
I like PDF; LaTeX isn't even aware of it.

----
Michael Ashton <data at ieee.org>
Peruvian intellectual Hernando de Soto on why his two dogs are named 
Marx and Engels: "They are German, hairy, and have no respect for 
property." (from _The Economist_, by way of _National Review_)