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.
