Re: [rfc-i] What do do about SVG

[Routing around an email server problem via gmail]

On 2020-12-15, at 20:47, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
> 
> Assuming that one of the goals is to have good tool support, what SVG tools do people use and what profiles do they support?

Assuming that we talk about authoring tools:

Inkscape and Omnigraffle were mentioned as the tools many people use for interactively creating graphics, maybe add Affinity Designer and Adobe Illustrator.  (All these also have some import function, although that is sometimes a bit of a hit or miss, as the internal data model may not be very congruent with all the complexities of SVG.)

There are also often import routes via EPS and PDF, pdf2svg/pdftocairo may be a general import mechanism for graphical information available in PDF form, which may in turn be generated by a zillion tools such as pandoc.

There are also tools that convert (potentially non-graphical) source-type information into graphics, which often support SVG output:

* goat and ditaa (for ASCII^Wtypewriter-art)
* mscgen (for message sequence charts)
* mermaid (for Flowchart, Sequence diagram, Class Diagram, State Diagram, Entity Relationship Diagram, User Journey, Gantt Chart, Pie Chart)
* plantuml (for UML diagrams, including much of the above)
* tex2svg (math formulae; can also use e.g. pandoc/pdftocairo)
* graphviz (general diagrams; DOT language, with neato, lefty)

Some of these tools assume they can use at least one gray scale level/color different from black/white; it is nearly impossible to compress this to bi-level (well, yeah, you can always use hatching or halftoning, for unwieldy and excruciatingly slow documents).

Graphs are also generated programmatically, e.g. using matplotlib or gnuplot.
Packages such as R have multiple SVG interfaces (e.g., svelte).

Note that not all of these have already been used for an RFC or I-D today, but this is like saying not all editors have been used for typing markdown — eventually, they will.  Use the right tool for the job.

Authors would probably do most of their rendering in browsers.

Grüße, Carsten

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