Synthetic Morpheme Christopher Taylor's editorials on Science, Technology, Salsa dancing and more Monday, February 03, 2003
The landscape of Linux on the desktop continues to change. Every time I turn around I discover some exciting feature that is being included in the latest version of KDE or Gnome. The latest thing to catch my attention is a vector graphics library that will be used in an upcoming version of Gnome to render icons and even GUI widgets [LibRSVG][via Slashdot]. Apparently, they have been putting a lot of work into the renderer and it is able to render faster than PNG. This is an important point, since you want the UI to render quickly. The advantage of a vector graphic icons, of course, is that they can be scaled up and down without any loss in quality. This is in contrast to raster icons that become more and more pixelated as they are scaled up. Check out a "metatheme" screenshot that uses the SVG library [screenshot]. 10:29:13 AM