On Sun, 2005-06-05 at 22:28 -0500, Rod Engelsman wrote: > The big advantage of vector graphics is that they are essentially > infinitely scalable and the precision with which you can describe > objects and their positions. It's the kind of thing used for computer > aided drafting and such. The disadvantage is that nature isn't that > mathematically "neat". So it's difficult to create objects which look > real, especially natural things like people. But if you create a drawing > with VG, you can zoom in on it as big as you like and it will always > look good with nice smooth curves. When you zoom in on a raster drawing > you very quickly get jagged edges and the whole thing looks like a pile > of Lego blocks. > > It's impossible to say that one is superior to the other in general, but > you can definitely say that one is superior to the other for a given > specific purpose.
I'd add that vectors are more computationally intensive but tend to produce smaller files. There has never really been a proper universal standard for vectors on PCs mainly because in the early days Windows didn't establish one. Acorn and Apple were more far-sighted in this respect. So on Windows it tends to be more difficult to import and export vectors between applications. As an example, on a RISCOS system in 1990 I could drag and drop a spreadsheet table into a DTP application and scale it to A0 size after rotating it through 45 degrees and print it without loss of resolution all in under 4 meg of RAM and with an 8 MHz processor with no math co-processor :-). -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMSL
