IMO, there's no hope of automatic PNG to (useful) SVG, seeing that that would involve adding information that isn't in the PNG file -- i.e., the converter would have to guess what lines and curves the bitmap is trying to suggest to the human eye. Maybe a sophisticated machine vision algorithm could do a conversion, but I bet it wouldn't look good.
Anyway, a piece set designed and supplied in SVG is obviously much better for scaling. If we have at least one nice looking SVG piece set to use as a default (do we? I haven't looked lately), dropping the ability to automatically select a pre-scaled bitmap set doesn't seem like a great loss to me. By the way, the main set I used to supply was designed in Metafont, and I used to run Metafont to generate the various sized pieces, then do some hand-tuning of the bitmap. I wonder if Metafont (or some other program that understands the Metafont language) can render to SVG these days. It would be cool to have the old familiar piece shapes as SVG. On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 2:04 AM, <h.g.mul...@hccnet.nl> wrote: > > The doc files suggest that the ZIICS chess sets were in a > > format unique to ZIICS, but that the ones called "Fritz" were converted > > from Fritz -- whether with or without permission I don't know. > > Well, the situation with pieces for XBoard since the switch to Cairo is > such that anything people made and used before is no longer usable without > converting it first to PNG. This can be done comparatively easily, but > even then the situation is less than ideal, because the PNG cannot be > scaled, and the new XBoard no longer automatically selects pieces matching > the current board size, as the old one did for the pixmaps. It really > relies on SVG. But AFAIK there is no automatic conversion from pixmaps to > SVG. > > People could pick a size most convenient for them, and install those as > PNG in their pieceImageDirectory. They would still have scaled version > available at othe board sizes, but they would look more fuzzy, as PNG > doesn't scale very well. > > There were a lot of nice (colored) piece graphics available as WinBoard > .bmp files (which can also be converted to PNG by the Linux 'convert' > utility), in the WinBoard Zeta package, which contained a WinBoard fork. > The guy that made the fork refused to provide the source code, however, in > violation of the GPL. When I demanded it, he stopped distributing the > package rather than publishing the source of WinBoard Zeta. > > > _______________________________________________ > Bug-XBoard mailing list > Bug-XBoard@gnu.org > https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-xboard >
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