EazyDraw Store Support Contact SiteMap
Hot News Screen Shots Applications Features Testimonials Gallery Download Buy Now
Previous Next
Scalable Vector Graphics
Vector Quality
Scalable Web Graphics
Export to Linux
Import and Export
Exchange with Windows
Read - Write "ai"
SVG Tiny Support
Wikipedia Required

Open XML Graphic Format:

SVG is an XML (Extensible Markup Language) language for the description of 2d vector graphics. This is an open standard sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). SVG has wide corporate and platform support, most browsers now support SVG graphics, Adobe was an early sponsor of the format. Microsoft has been a "hold-out" but recently (2010) joined the SVG Working Group.

High Quality Web Graphics

Most web browsers now support SVG. The EazyDraw export was tested against, Safari, Opera, and FireFox. The splash screen above is a svg image (not a jpg or png), the svg original file is on our web site and this web page displays the vector svg image with the normal html img reference. If you are using a browser that allows a large zoom (Opera for example), increase the zoom and note that you can actually read clearly the example svg code seen in the svg logo. If your browser is not displaying the splash screen - change browsers or locate and install the appropriate svg plugin.

Exchange Drawings With Other Apps and Systems:

Many vector drawing applications on different operating systems accept and export SVG. This means for example that you can exchange original artwork colleagues on Windows or Linux. The EazyDraw import and export was tested extensively for successfully interchange with Inkscape on Linux and Windows and Adobe Illustrator on Mac OS X.

Open Art
It is now possible to find a great deal of contributed open (and on sale) content available in the SVG format. This content when imported is fully editable as EazyDraw original vector content. This makes the world wide web a personal user library.
Wikipedia Contributions
Many online institutions are embracing the advantages of SVG. Wikipedia, for example, now requests (nearly insists) on SVG for all graphic contributions. For example the s-s-S logo and W3C icon on the splash screen to the left were obtained as SVG originals and included "as-is" on this web page.
Mobile Devices & SVGZ
EazyDraw supports 6 profiles of the specification from SVG Tiny through SVG 1.1. These profiles were recently added to the specification to support mobile devices with limited computational resources. SVGZ is supported for both import and export
EazyDraw download is a 13 meg universal binary optimized for both the Intel and PowerPC Mac processors, run on Leopard or Tiger, Panther and Jaguar version available
The download is a disk image file (dmg), its size is 23 Meg.

XML - Text Based Drawing Files:

SVG is a text based graphic format. These drawing files may be viewed and edited with any text editor. Most text editors have special support for XML and perhaps SVG constructs. The EazyDraw export has options to format the export file for size or readability. When readability is selected the file is formatted and indented for a clean easy to read XML document. If desired EazyDraw will include unique DOM identifiers for each graphic construct. These can be used for pre - or post processing by other text/xml based applications. One can use SVG to create original art for viewing with EazyDraw using a text editor.

Test Suite and Examples:

The EazyDraw Contributions Pack includes a test suite of SVG drawings. Many of these originated as test / verification examples from the public domain, W3C groups and others. These are useful as examples of how to write SVG drawing code. The suite covers a wide range of drawing constructs.

Font / Glyph Export Support:

The EazyDraw SVG export supports 7 options for Font and Glyph definition. For minimal file size the "System Font" option allows the reader-client application to use installed system fonts. Other options will embed font glyph vector definitions in the SVG drawing file, files are somewhat larger but the author has more control over the final appearance of the drawing. Since EazyDraw is an authoring application, font licensing requirements are best satisfied by only using fonts licensed and installed the user's system.

GZIP compression - SVGZ and Export Optimization for Size:

The text nature of a SVG document means that the file size can be larger than a comparable binary format. However the SVG specification provides numerous constructs to allow re-use of specified information. Whenever possible, EazyDraw's export full exploits these design constructs. This design practice keeps exported SVG drawings down to a rather reasonable size. SVGZ is the defined compressed standard for the format. This is a open defined compression (GZIP) specification and is widely supported. When compressed the resulting drawing file exhibits size characteristics comparable to any optimized binary format. These conventions are in wide use on all platforms and applications providing an efficient format for the exchange of vector original content. For example BBEdit will open and display a SVGZ file directly without an extra unpacking step.

Embedded or External Bitmap Graphics:

The Export allows for embedded or external bitmap graphics. Often in web design it is desirable to have a single copy of a bitmap graphic that is used in several places or on several different web pages. When exporting a SVG drawing with EazyDraw you can elect to use this technique for bitmap images that may be part of a drawing. In other cases one may want to these images to be in the single SVG drawing file - this method is also supported by the SVG export.

This web page designed, created and published entirely with BBEdit and EazyDraw.
EazyDraw, a Dekorra Optics LLC enterprise
Contact: ph +1 608 444 5245 fax: +1 608 635 2124 mail: N5040 Beach Garden Road, Poynette, WI USA.
Copyright © 2011, All rights reserved.