On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Pieter Neerincx <pieter.neerincx@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Peter,
On Apr 20, 2011, at 11:07 AM, Peter Cock wrote:
Hi all,
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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.
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? Peter