this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
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today i learned: svg files are just text in an html-like language (lemmy.today)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by adrianhooves@lemmy.today to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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what the heck!! that is so wild, mind blowing, i thought the main difference between raster graphics and vector graphics was the quality but i didn't think about it too deeply.

i had no idea svg files actually used html code and pretty much could be modified using only text and amazing code woa!!! this opens up the possibility for so many things on linux i think.

for example, on a linux distro, we could modify the desktop environment and make it waaaaay lighter by getting rid of jpg or png icons and just using pure svg on it.

svg can be given a lot of attributes like movement, mouse hovering, change color, change anything. and most svg files are still under a megabyte. wow.. please let me know other fun facts about svg or eps files. i really like doing graphic design on linux and inkscape.

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[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

main difference between raster graphics and vector graphics was the quality

It's not. The primitives, the most basic constitutive building blocks, are different, for raster it's the pixel (a mix of colors, e.g. red/green/blue) whereas for vector it's the ... vector (a relative position elements, e.g. line, circle, rectangle or text start with).

This is a fundamental distinction on how you interact with the content. For raster you basically paint over pixels, changing the values of pixels, whereas for vector you change values of elements and add/remove elements. Both can be lossless though (vector always is) as for raster can have no compression or lossless compression. That being said raster does have a grid size (i.e. how many pixels are stored, e.g. 800x600) whereas vector does not, letting you zoom infinitely and see no aliasing on straight lines.

Anyway yes it's fascinating. In fact you can even modify SVG straight from the browser, no image editor or text editor needed, thanks to your browser inspector (easy to change the color of a rectangle for example) or even the console itself then via JavaScript and contentDocument you can change a lot more programmatically (e.g. change the color of all rectangles).

It's a lot of fun to tinker with!

[–] SomeoneSomewhere@lemmy.nz 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I'm not sure that lossy compression on vectors is strictly impossible.

You can do things like store less colour information and simplify splines so that curves are less complex.

[–] utopiah@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

True, in fact I've done so myself (simplifying a curve resulting of hand sketching). Still I'd argue that's not the expected behavior of storing the vector file but rather explicitly modifying it.