C/PA 2003 XIX th International Symposium, 30 September - 04 October, 2003, Antalya, Turkey 
is needed. Figure 1 demonstrates this difference between raster 
and vector graphics. Left is a raster format small and enlarged. 
Right is a vector format; the enlargement does not loose image 
quality while the file size is the same. The sample is taken from 
the document www.w3c.org/tr/SVG-access. 
Figure 1 : Comparison of raster and vector graphic 
3 CONVERTING AND VIEWING 
Adobe and Apache provide common viewers for SVG. Adobe’s 
SVG viewer (release 3.0 at the time of writing) is provided as a 
plug-in for Web-browsers or as a stand-alone version. 
Downloading from www.adobe.com/svg leads to a quickly and 
automatically installation. 
Clicking the right mouse button in a SVG window opens the 
context menu with access to the functions zoom-in, zoom-out, 
panning, help and some others. There is no learning curve exist 
ing. 
The Batik SVG browser from Apache can be downloaded as a 
standalone program from xml.apache.org/batik/svgviewer.html 
For CAD files (DWG, DXF) and bitmaps (BMP, WMF) are 
converting tools existing. 1 downloaded SVG Factory, ACME 
CAD Converter and CAD2SVG for test purposes from the 
Internet. 
SVG Factory is freeware. It converts BMP / WMF files to SVG. 
Optimisation can be selected as a transfer option. With this 
limited functionality and the required conversion from 
DWG/DXF to WMF or BMP it seems to not be sufficient for 
CAD applications. But for bitmap images it is useful and results 
in sufficient conversions. The Bitmap shown in figure 3 was 
reduced from 2200 kByte from its original to 332 kByte as the 
resulted SVG file. The interface of SVG Factory is very simple 
but easy to access. The software can be downloaded from 
www.svgfactory.com. 
ACME CAD Converter is equipped with a professional CAD 
interface. An imported CAD file (DWG/DXF) can be viewed in 
3D mode. 3D data is supported to a certain extend. The user 
interface supplies a submenu for the layer table. Layers can be 
switched on/off as well as line type converting. All the results 
shown here are converted without any problems. Some better 
structuring of the SVG file could be provided. Using the layer 
tables and some final editing solve those slightly inconvenience. 
The license fee is in the range of shareware. For downloading 
visit www.freefirestudio.com. 
Another converter is cad2svg from Savage Software. This con 
verter is unfortunately not able to handle all 3D elements. Only 
wire frame information will be converted. Nevertheless 
CAD2SVG is a professional tool including features one cannot 
find in other software. The home page can be visited under 
www.savagesoftware.com. 
All tested converters are writing to SVG and SVGZ the com 
pressed file format. 
' '• T" 
Figure 2: Converting bitmap to SVG with SVG Factory. The 
result is displayed in a browser window with Adobe SVG 
viewer plug-in including the context menu 
Figure 3: Converting with ACME CAD converter. The 3D 
object is transformed into an isometric projection by applying 
the 3D view menu.