Vector graphics rock

[Pylon]

I just spent much of the day using Inkscape to make a vector file. It's awesome for graphics that don't involve photographs, as the sharpness and scalability of .svg is just amazing. It's also great when text is involved due to said scalability.

A periodic table wallpaper I originally made in Inkscape (in JPEG, converted from .svg):



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

it scales from 2560x1600 to 1280x800 just fine. IMO, .svg > .png for originals. There's just too many advantages for creating a non-photographic original in .svg instead of .png.

[Pylon]

Also, color changes and other edits (scaling objects) are super easy since they're treated as separate objects (think layers, but every single object gets their own layer).

[Brian8bit]

How do I go about downloading the original *.svg, it keeps throwing *.jpg at me

[microsoft windows]

I believe that Microsoft Bob pioneered vector graphics back in the day. That was probably the  only useful  contribution to computing it  really ever had.

[Computer-Lab in Basement]

MS Bob is pretty useless, but it is rather amusing to use.

[EverythingIBM]

Microsoft bob is actually like a lot of horrible software released in that time. I remember playing old windows 9x games highly reminiscent of MS Bob. I even have a disc with over "100 great windows games", if, anyone is interested in playing some...

I should give them to MW later.

Anyways, vector graphics are really nice! Especially due to the fact you can edit the shapes dynamically and layer them... opposed to stuck pixels.
A disadvantage to vector is that it can sometimes look a little funky when you blow it up too big, takes a fair amount of CPU, and the like... but these issues are too minuscule to be bothered by.

Powerpoint 97 also has vector graphics. I used to make 3D shapes and other vector stuff in there when I was a kid.

[Brian8bit]

Anyone remember Packard Bell Navigator? Equally as horrible as MS Bob.

[Pylon]

How do I go about downloading the original *.svg, it keeps throwing *.jpg at me

.svg is an invalid file format for attachments here, and Imageshack doesn't allow .svg, so I uploaded a JPEG (gradient would kill PNG, so I decided JPEG).
Here's the 16:10 ZIP if you want it.

I edited the thing and decided to use another source (a public domain one), as I copied the original data from a periodic table in a chemistry textbook. That might be violating copyright laws, so I switched sources. Some of the atomic weight data changed slightly.

[mike]

I believe that Microsoft Bob pioneered vector graphics back in the day. That was probably the  only useful  contribution to computing it  really ever had.

Well inaccurate only by around half a century. Vector graphics were used at least as far back as the US SAGE system of the 1950s. Even if you restrict yourself to the use of vector graphics in desktop environments, their use goes back at least as far as the introduction of Display PostScript in Sun's NeWS in 1986.

[ch_123]

SGI did a lot of cool **** with Vector graphics, including using them for icons on IRIX and the like. Makes you wonder why they aren't more common.

[Pylon]

Last time I checked Ubuntu's logos were partly vector.

[keyb_gr]

Vector graphics, while useful for the reasons given, are old news. Some of the classic PC applications for them in the early/mid '90s included Corel Draw and Micrografx Designer. The latter always struck me as a lot more user-friendly. Never did too much graphics work though.

Inkscape is quite nice. I used it for some thesis illustrations back in '09. The then-current "stable" version was pretty crashy in fact, but a newer build worked well.

I'd love to use SVG illustrations in my web pages, but that would require serious server-side infrastructure with content negotiation and all instead of the simple static HTML pages I have now. (Inline SVG only works with application/xhtml+xml XHTML pages, so a text/html alternative with PNG images would be required in addition.)

[microsoft windows]

Anyone remember Packard Bell Navigator? Equally as horrible as MS Bob.

N