KDE Conquers the Vectors with KSVG

KSVG has recently been moved to the kdegraphics module, meaning that KSVG will now be part of the KDE 3.2 release. KSVG aims to be a full flavored implementation of the W3C SVG standard. Some of you will think of icons when we speak of SVG but SVG is much more: It is a web technology with full ECMAScript/DOM support. With the number of SVG powered sites growing steadily, Konqueror will soon be able to display these sites with a high-quality and open-source viewer. KSVG is fully integrated into the KDE framework and can be used in your applications as a KPart, enabling you to add support for vector graphics quite easily. Have a look at this special preview of KSVG and prepare yourself for the power of vectors in KDE 3.2!

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Comments

by Sandy C. Otmus (not verified)

Who would want to sue KParts? I mean, really.

by Paulo Junqueira (not verified)

Did you post some comments in GNOME sites too? In various of the Brazillian and WORLD sites about KDE I can see you posting notes about GNOME. I like GNOME too but, what´s your intension?

"I invite the KDE users to try GNOME..."
"This GNOME feature is cool..."

Hey man, please continue to promote GNOME but try to have a bit of ethic...

I'm a fan fo both desktops and I want KDE to improve and I list notable GNOME features which I would like in KDE on the dot sometimes, so what.

I refer you to this thread which explains everything to a person just like you.
http://dot.kde.org/1063222993/1063247522/

One of the biggest shortcomings of HTML is the lack of rotated text.

Is the KSVG-implementation in KDE 3.2 able to display a simple text which is rotated for example by 90°?

Thanks

Hi,

Yes KSVG can both display simple text at any rotation/scale as well as display
top-to-bottom scripts. Try it if you dont believe me :)
Cheers,

Rob.

by Haakon Nilsen (not verified)

The lack of rotated text is NOT a shortcoming of HTML. It's at best a lack of CSS. Sorry, it had to be said :)

I think it will be in CSS 3.

You should be able to adress this with CSS3 when support for CSS3 becomes widespread(read- when hell freezes over, when ipv6 support is in all OS's). SVG, or PNG images are probably a better idea for now. SVG support is not all that great either, so probably images are a better solution for now. The writing-mode property in the text module will let you you get 90 degree rotated text, but its a nasty hack seeing as that property is meant to help display mongolian...

yes it can be done

rotated text

rotated text

Very old thread, but since I found this looking for an answer to the same question, I suppose I can revive it.

writing-mode is not part of any CSS standard. It is part of the XSL recommendation (http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/slice7.html#writing-mode-related), though. So I guess it is a bad idea to rely on it for now.

writing-mode is not implemented in Mozilla browsers (Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape) as of Firefox 1.7.

by AHmed Kamal (not verified)

But what about the rotation in the other direction I Want read it from the bottom to the top direction ... is that possible ??

by norman (not verified)

With this engine, we don't need to settle for arbitrary icons anymore. Features like large/stretchable icons, icons coloring themselves depeinding on the color scheme. It would be a lot easier to do these things when the icons are vectors rather than prerendred png. KDE is a long way behind gnome when it comes to SVG graphics, and I'm glad KDE is starting to catchup with KDE.

by Datschge (has t... (not verified)

"I'm glad KDE is starting to catchup with KDE"
I'm glad about that as well. ;)

by standsolid (not verified)

yeah, it's about freaking time we caught up to those guys. I mean KDE has been SO far ahead for SO long... it's good to see some competition like KDE rock the boat a little. when desktops compete, it makes both of them better. ;p

by mario (not verified)

That's a funny ;)

Anyway, I don't think GNOME was ever ahead of KDE in SVG, it's jsut that they have had a shroter release cycle and so their work is already out while KDE 3.2 will be worked on for at least a year I hope. GNOME only has SVG icon rendering as does KDE 3.1. This implementation is much more than jsut icons.

by Maynard (not verified)

No, the themes (GTK) can also be SVG. And Metacity I think.

by Thomas (not verified)

No, I think, that there's an experimental vector-theme implementation available for gtk+, though it does not seem to be based on svg. It was made to test out the functionality of cairo (related to the XFree Project), which aims to incorporate vector based functionality into XFree.

by Maynard (not verified)

No. There is a whole suite of themes. Gorilla, Nuvola, Lush, Wasp and Crystal. go to librsvg.sourceforge.net to check them out.

by Thomas (not verified)

o.k... svg icons are not the most interesting part, we'll have crystal svg cions sooner or later plus any free svg icon themes from other desktops...(me thinks)...

I was speaking of a widget style made of vector gfx... well _that's_ cool...

by Chakie (not verified)

I wonder if simple games such as turnbased strategy games and board games could benefit from using SVG for the graphics? The whole idea is in my opinion not that far fetched.

by Jeff Johnson (not verified)

Not really. They could use it, of course, but SVG itself wouldnt such a large benefit over any other cnavas with a similar renderer. The largest advantage would probably be that that your cnavas is based on a common file format.

by Rob Kaper (not verified)

Which is exactly why Atlantik is adopting KSVG.

by Simon (not verified)

Will svg icons be the default in KDE 3.2 or will we have to wait for another release?

SD

by chris (not verified)

i want Auto-recreate icons at anysize, because of speed

Auto recreate SVG ICON as PNG with the new selected size.

chris

by anon (not verified)

Could we see Qt widget styles in SVG? It's already possible in gtk. If someone were to make a widget style engine for Qt, we could have cross desktop themeing ! :)

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

I've always tought about this too.
This would be great. You could more easily create a theme (no need for hardcoded, you can use SVG+EMCAScript) and themes could be cross-plataform!

Wow makes me dizzy! Would be really good :)

by Peter Plys (not verified)

That would be nice-nice-nice.
Somebody from Troll Tech lurking around?

by anon (not verified)

You don't need trolltech to implement this because of the nature of qstyles (they are qt plugins)

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

As a brazilian I want to know why there are some countries not highlited on football (soccer) zones?
I mean, why only Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Ecuator are highlited?

You know... football and brazilians are important to each other, so I'm curious :)

by Iuri Fiedoruk (not verified)

Ouch, nevermind, NOW I've read the text.
It's the nations who got into 2002 world cup.

A candy to who answer who was the champion! :)

by mario (not verified)

Where did mosfet go, it seems write after someone posted the X fork "unconfirmed rumor" all over at PCLINUXONLINE.COM, Inquirer, Madpenguin, KDE-LOOk etc. and everyone started totally insulting him and being a bitch his website was offline and it's still offline.

I hope he didn't get sick and if he's just pissed at the community and other people he has every right to be and the people who insulted him for posting that rumor on his personal website ought to be ashamed, he had every right to and clerarly stated he did not know if it was true yet.

I really hopes he will come back to KDE and is jsut too busy now, PixiePLus (development version) and Liquid 0.9.6 (development versioN) are fantastic and he did a lot more than just Liquid and PixiePlus.

If anyone knows where I canc ontact him please tell me.

Sorry taht this si O, it's jsut that all this talk about svg themes, svg icons and all this graphics talk made me think about him.

by Wurzelgeist (not verified)

Don't forget MosfetPaint!

by mario (not verified)

Yeah, but I never actually got to try his paint program. I did like a lot of his ideas, like his professional thumbnail specifcation which the entire Linux community would benefit from, it is much faster and just plain better in every way. His kicker contributions and HiColor theme were also cool, thecommand line image browser was interesting too, but I like to have a GUI, he did a lot for KDE and Linux.

It's a shame the community was so mean, I guess all the SCO news postings were stressing out everyone and lot sof people flew of their handle thinking that mosfet posted to large nws sites when in reality he only poste don his website and his website readers did that for him,

by Chuck (not verified)

I know that the vector graphics look great in SVG, way to go KSVG team! However, can anyone tell me about the limitations of scripting in SVG? I've seen examples where you can push buttons, etc. How interactive can SVG be? Could this be a replacement for applets where some client side interaction is useful?

Thanks for any help,
-Chuck

by Rob Buis (not verified)

Hi,

It can become very interactive. Simulating input widgets like buttons, combo boxes etc. are very well possible and there exist svg implementations for this for a long time now. The limitations depend on how much of the DOM you can access, but for svg you can change its whole DOM and so do things like update text after pressing a button. I am not sure how much of the normal html/xml DOM can be accessed and changed though. The new work on SVG 1.2 tries to standardize possible UI functionality using svg AFAIK.
Cheers,

Rob.

by Andreas Streichardt (not verified)

SVG 1.2 adds geturl/posturl and parsexml to SVG. With get- and posturl you can get content from a webserver (triggered by a button for example). parsexml will then return a documentfragement which you could add to your SVG. So SVG can be VERY interactive.
This is currently broken in cvs but niko is trying to fix that ;).

by Paul (not verified)

Could you give an URL or something where I can find this kind of examples?
I've searched for this, but all I can find is code that 'will eventually be able to....'
Nothing working, so far! :-(

by Johan De Messemaeker (not verified)

Especially the KPart layer. Outstanding work !

Regards, Johan

by hume smith (not verified)

What are the technical prerequisites for konqi to show SVG? I just built 3.2.1 (libs, base, and graphics, plus some others) from the NetBSD pkgsrc and konqi's as ignorant of SVG as ever ... what could be missing? ksvgtopng works, and svgdisplay sorta works (gets the colours wrong if it doesn't run out of threads and crash) ... but my konqi thinks SVG are some sort of text object ...