Could W3C/Adobe's Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics be the answer ? Is
there a non-java implementation of SVG that I can embed in my Cocoa
applications ?
SVG has lots of advantages - it's fairly simple to create (being XML,
one can even directly create it out of other XML data using XSLT),
and easy enough to parse to extract information (again, it's XML, so
you can use all the XML code that is already provided for you). It
easily supports additional meta data (on the file as well as any
element in the file) which are a much more flexible version of custom
pic comments in PICT files. Its rendering model is _very_ similar to
Quartz's as well.
It can also be displayed using WebKit (such as the version that comes
with Safari 3.0 betas).
The only major drawbacks are that there is no "intrinsic" support
(like there is for TIFF, PDF), though one can write an NSImageRep
subclass to handle a lot of that for you, and it has outside
dependancies (Safari 3.0 beta which requires 10.4.9). The other
major drawback is that there is so that has been thrown into SVG it's
all but impractical to have something _fully_ support _all_ the
features (since it includes animation, JavaScript, filters not
entirely unlike CoreImage, embedded fonts, etc...)
I've been working (on and off) on an SVG library that runs all the
way back to 10.3.9 that I've used in a product. Basically, I needed
a simple "shape" library, and it was just easier to write an SVG
parser and use Inkspot to create the SVGs instead of creating a
simpler format and trying to create the images by editing the raw
files - it was a couple of days to get most of the common things
working, so it's definitely doable (you can grab my "SVG Detective"
utility to see an earlier version of the library in action).
Glenn Andreas email@hidden
<http://www.gandreas.com/> wicked fun!
Cardographer | the custom playing card designer
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