On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Pieter Neerincx
<pieter.neerincx(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> On Apr 20, 2011, at 5:47 PM, Peter Cock wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Pieter Neerincx
>> <pieter.neerincx(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hi Peter,
>>>
>>> On Apr 20, 2011, at 11:07 AM, Peter Cock wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> ...<cut>...
>>>
>>>> How about SVG? Don't most of the mainline browsers have
>>>> reasonably good SVG support built in (possibly via a plugin)?
>>>
>>> Yep, SVG support is pretty good nowadays especially in FireFox
>>> and Opera. Safari, IE and Chrome have only partial support, but
>>> for simple charts without 3D filters it works fine. I've added SVG
>>> as a datatype to my Galaxy and this works great. You won't need
>>> a plugin; in fact the old Adobe SVG plugin is depreciated already
>>> for a few years now and no longer compatible with recent browser
>>> versions.
>>
>> I looked at SVG about a year ago, and was pretty impressed.
>> I did run into some issues, particularly with links, and opted to
>> use PNG files in the end. Since then we've finally dropped IE6,
>> so hopefully SVG would be safe now.
>>
>> Are your changes to add SVG as a datatype to Galaxy public?
>> I'd like to suggest that be merged to the trunk.
>
> I simply added this line to my datatypes_conf.xml:
>
> <datatype extension="svg" type="galaxy.datatypes.images:Image" mimetype="image/svg+xml"/>
>
> I didn't make a sniffer as I don't have a use case for users
> uploading SVGs, so I didn't have to create a Python class and
> SVG is just another instance of galaxy.datatypes.images:Image
> from a plain vanilla Galaxy.
That makes sense if the sniffer is only used on upload.
> To make sure the client displays the SVG you may have to add
> the SVG mimetype to your web server's config too. Where this
> is defined may differ per linux distro. I use apache as a proxy
> and had to add
>
> image/svg+xml svg svgz
>
> to /etc/mime.types.
Thanks for the details - it looks simple enough to add here too.
If/when any SVG producing tools are added to Galaxy or the
Galaxy Tool Shed, then it would be nice to have this done in
the main repository.
>>> The nice benefit of SVG in addition to not needing a plugin is
>>> that the image can scale with the surrounding text if you zoom
>>> in your browser (without loosing resolution).
>>>
>>> The disadvantage is that although my users know what a PDF
>>> file is and can process them for posters/manuscripts, most of
>>> them never heard of SVG and get stuck when it doesn't import
>>> into PowerPoint et al. :(
>>
>> Do they cope with PDF?
>
> Well, they know how to view and print one :). Importing them
> directly into PowerPoint and Word is just as problematic though,
> so that usually involves opening the PDF in a different program
> and copy/paste or exporting to another format. Still a hassle, but
> they manage...
Getting a PDF into PowerPoint or Word is easy on a Mac ;)
But yes, point taken - even though a PDF is easier to work with
than an SVG (or a postscript file), it can still be a hassle.
Peter