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by archfrog 1188 days ago
Three cheers!!!

So fine with new and actually improved technologies instead of the many GUI rehashes that some companies make money off delivering all the time.

I don't often use SVG, and am by no means an expert on it, but I dislike the experience every time. Like having to edit an .SVG file to fix a wrong displacement that places it a bit too far down. Trial and error, trial and error, until you randomly hit the spot that makes the thing begin to behave.

I think TVG popularity boils down to browser support and nothing else. I hope somebody with the skills picks up the task of integrating it into Chromium, then the rest of the world will bend and bow quickly.

Also, one might hope that a freeware GUI editor will see the light in not too long.

Perhaps the authors should do a new single-protocol Mail/Calendar/Contacts/Notes/etc. standard as well? I recall IMAP being a horribly clumsy and complex protocol, and didn't Einstein say:

   Make it as simple as you can, but not simpler!
3 comments

inkscape allows you to modify and save SVGs in plain SVG format. You can also right-click an SVG and modify its properties in the inspector window.

SVG is a very impressive, extremely clear format with many bells and whistles such as text-to-path and animation built-in.

The only improvement I can see it might need is a better compression functionality that can selectively prioritize symbols to load first if the SVG is sufficiently large.

I love SVG, but there are a lot of improvements that I can think of: conic gradients, better (and faster) filters, a less awkwards non-scaling stroke definition, better color spaces for gradients, lightweight symbols that are not copies in shadow DOM, meshes, etc.
If we are really talking wish lists, I dream of a simplified PDF spec.
Also a simplified font spec while we're at it? While there are libraries for it, it is apparently discouraging if you wanted to code your own parser for the existing font formats.
That's still just making the best of a bad situation. Carves out bits and pieces of a too-complicated format.
Postscript?
Unlike PDF, PostScript is a full Turing-complete programming language, capable of far more document complexity than PDF (though less interactivity). The PostScript Language Reference Manual is 900 pages, and the PostScript Language Reference Supplement is another 160.
PDF however includes (a subset of) Javascript, making it just as Turing complete.

The spec for PDF 1.7 (dated 2008) is 745 pages long. The more modern PDF 2.0 is not freely available. I'm not willing to spend hundreds of euros to get access to the document, but together with the long list of errata and additional documents linked from the standard body's website, I'm willing to bet it's at least equivalent in length to PostScript.

> PDF however includes (a subset of) Javascript, making it just as Turing complete.

Not really, because the JavaScript is quite limited in what it can do (e.g. forms and interactive features). It can't produce text or graphical elements. A PDF reader can show view of a PDF that looks correct even if it doesn't implement any of the JavaScript features.

Support will vary by viewer, but Chrome's built-in PDF viewer supports a subset of Javascript.

It's enough to play Breakout inside a PDF: https://youtu.be/6rbJu10Telc?t=483

For us laymen, what is fundamentally lacking from svg to handle common PDF use cases ? (Including some multipage svg maybe) ?
The lack of multipage support is the most obvious distinction, I think, but you could probably add the necessary metadata and render fake borders and boxes to simulate pages if you really wanted to. As far as I know, SVGs cannot contain forms for one example. PDFs can also be digitally signed according to the spec, and they contain DRM provisions.

PDF has a lot of features that I would never think of myself (pronunciation guides, for example) which would require designing a custom solution for in many other formats such as SVG.

If I wanted to render something to be printed and I wanted it to be printed exactly as specified, I would consider PDF (and PostScript) files to be much more reliable than SVG files. SVGs are great for images and icons, but they're simply not designed to do the things PDF was designed to do.

Conversely, PDFs are difficult to embed and require proprietary tools to use most of their less common features, so in many areas they're much worse than SVGs.

> Also, one might hope that a freeware GUI editor will see the light in not too long.

Have you tried Inkscape for editing SVGs? It’s more of an Adobe Illustrator wannabe but it’s not half bad.