[Sussex] Gnome2.2 / librSVG

[Geoff Teale]

Having finished my work with the Red Hat beta I shall, tonight be restoring
my Gentoo 1.4 rc2 image.  Job one after that is to install the Gnome 2.2
release.

I'm very excited about Gnome 2.2, mainly because it features the latest
version of librSVG.  Now I have a bit of bias towards SVG for various
reasons, but I am very keen to see it become the dominant standard for non
photo-graphic images in the free software world.  In Gnome 2.2 SVG is now
not only pervasive (all graphics in Gnome 2.2 can be rendered from SVG where
normally youd have used a raster based format like PNG or JPEG), it has full
support in the theme engines (that are slowly but surely being unified) and,
now is actually faster to render than raster files (now, that _is_ a
suprise!).

So Scalable Vector Graphics are the future of the attractive desktop - no
more jaggie images stretched to fit your 1600x1200 desktop.

I know this stuff is relatively trivial compared to the secutiy and
functionality of mail servers etc, but for me, as a LINUX user and coder,
this is important and it gives the LINUX desktop a flashy "wow" factor that
windows simply does not have (Windows support for SVG is limited to IE
plugins (produced by ADOBE and also available for LINUX!), various command
line display apps and a couple of SVG design applications.  Apple has decent
scaling on icons (although this achieved through the provision of very large
icon files and very good, fast Anti-Aliasing), but in terms of integration
of vector graphics into the GUI architecture (which is frankly much better
than relying on Anti-Aliasing) Gnome 2.2 and XFree86 4.2 lead the way.
Combined with the frankly, excellent font rendering and highly configurable
anti-aliasing control for fonts in recent versions of Gnome and you have an
area of UNIX technology, that was a subject of ridicule 12 months ago, but
is now out infront of every other platform.  It's a testament to the rate of
improvement that happens with the very large amount of resource available to
Open Source projects.  Moreover Gnome 2.2 beat it's release date by a month!

Like the motto of Gnome 2.2 says :

"Where we're going, we don't need roads..."

... kudos to the first person to spot the source of that quote.. ;)

-- 
geoff.teale at claybrook.co.uk
tealeg at member.fsf.org

"Injustice is happening now; suffering is happening now. We have choices to
make now. To insist on absolute certainty before starting to apply ethics to
life decisions is a way of choosing to be amoral."
   - Richard M Stallman


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