Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> __/ [ Rex Ballard ] on Friday 02 June 2006 17:41 \__
> > Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> >> http://www.oetrends.com/news.php?action=view_record&idnum=529
> >
> > I do find this a bit amusing. The xfig editor was an open source
> > project that even predated Linux. This was a WYSIWYG postscript
> > editor.
>
> Yes, but it's a rather poor one and it is not compatible with some of the
> latest (some of which is not standard despite the .fig suffix/extension). I
> have used xfig before, albeit very briefly.
I used it for a couple of projects where I wanted scalable graphics,
back when I was using a Sun SPArC-10 as my primary workstation.
I was just trying to point out that vector graphics have been available
in various forms for a long time. AT&T had Vector graphics back before
X11. Dec had vector graphics programs for the VT300 terminal. The
Tektronics Terminal emulation was provided for Xterm because so many of
the old Unix applications were written for that terminal.
Back before postscript, we had Forth, which gave us vector graphics on
a number of platforms ranging from PCs to Atari 400s.
And Ghostscript is a pretty good standard alternative to the adobe
implementation.
Anyone remember the Pilot language and it's Turtle Graphics?
> The next generation of
> applications includes FOSS such as Inkscape. It would not be so far-fetched
> to imagine a Google graphics-related takeover. They can have accompanying
> Web services and even a Wine-bound port would be better than nothing.
Vector graphics are nice to have for 2D, but more easily implemented in
3D environments.
Vector graphics have been available on X11 almost from the beginning.
Numerous vector based editors have been done as teaching projects.
TCL, and PERL use TK graphics, which is also a vector program. TCL/TK
is frequently used on AOL. Perl/TK is used on many web site to
generate graphics which are then converted to bitmapped graphics.
There are also graphics packages like GNUPlot. Though this is normally
used for plotting charts and graphs, it can also be used to describe
any other graphical objects.
> > There was also the PHIGS standard, and a number of other vector
> > graphics editiors.
>
> OpenOffice can be used as a vector graphics editor. In SUSE 9.3, for example,
> OpenOffice 2 is listed among this category, surprisingly enough.
Yes. And ODF documents can include vector graphics described in XML.
The compressed XML documents can be smaller than most compressed
bitmaps.
The interesting irony is that Vector graphics were not included in W3C
standards because the Windows 3.1 workstations were too slow to do
vector graphics reliably. In addition, the 80386 machines being used
in those early days did not always come with floating point processors.
Microsoft wanted powerpoint to be used for revisable vector graphics.
Sun was pushing for Java based Vector graphics. There have been a few
attempts at establishing vector graphic standards, but there is a great
deal of reluctance to adopt any solution that isn't truly
multiplatform.
> Best wishes,
>
> Roy
>
> --
> Roy S. Schestowitz | One, Two, Free Open Source Software (FOSS)
> http://Schestowitz.com | Open Prospects ¦ PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
> 6:55pm up 36 days 1:27, 10 users, load average: 0.95, 0.92, 0.90
> http://iuron.com - knowledge engine, not a search engine
|
|
