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I just started to learn svg. One thing perplexes me is I find some site use svg/path to draw a text logo. Like this one:http://www.desiringgod.org/
The logo is pretty simple itself, however, the SVG it is using contain a horrendous <path> tag where there are lots of numbers.
I understand that with SVG we can scale the logo, but I don't see any difference if this logo is based on a .png file. So what really is the benefit?
Secondly, I don' think something like
<path d="M115.326252,8.93098333 L115.326252,16.3798167 L113.923083,16.3798167 L113.923083,14.96265 L113.878305,14.96265 C113.092947,16.0569833 111.560896,16.5939833 109.858654,16.5939833 C106.367752,16.5939833 103.855367,14.0609833 103.855367,8.63131667 C103.855367,3.20098333 106.367752,0.667483333 109.858654,0.667483333 C112.454152,0.667483333 114.454146,1.91331667 115.390858,5.21765 L113.771894,5.53931667 C113.007521,3.07148333 111.7296,2.12731667 109.943088,2.1273166 ....</path>
is written by human being. This must be generated by something, isn't it?
The benefits of using SVG logos over PNG logos are the following:
Scale to any size, perfect for responsive websites.
Look sharp on retina displays.
Don't lose clarity, except for very tiny sizes (same with PNG).
With PNG files you would most likely need to generate multiple resolution versions of the same image and hope that the original image is large enough to support the future display resolutions (8K for example).
And yes, the path is not written by a human being. It's a standard part of an SVG file. You could also do stuff like export SVG files as HTML5 canvas code with an ink2canvas extension in Inkscape.
Advantages of SVG:
Resolution Independence
Super-Accessible DOM Node-Based API
No Unnecessary HTTP Requests
Easy Interactive Scripting
Read more details on: Why Aren’t You Using SVG?
In here, I will describe some differences between using SVG and PNG from an application perspective:
SVG files are lighter than PNG files when deployed to your
application.
PNG is more efficient as far as UI responsiveness since the file is
already within your application, and there is no scaling needed, but it's heavier than your SVG file.
PNG gives a better focus to photographs or detailed images than SVG.
I personally use SVG for icons and logos and PNG for photographs or detailed images.
SVG offers a way to do full resolution graphical elements, no matter
what size screen, what zoom level, or what resolution your user's
device has.
So you write HTML? JavaScript? CSS? Good. Then you already know a lot of what you need to know to get writing SVG.
SVG actually uses an XML-compatible format to define its rendering shapes. Beyond this, you can actually style shapes in CSS, and make them interactive with JavaScript. Multiple JS libraries exist to assist you in this world, like D3.js and Raphael. Here's an example of an SVG element group (the Envato leaf).
The other benefit of SVG is,
When you use images in an html document with the tag, you are defining a file that the user's browser will request. This request will take up bandwidth and require more precious time to download. If your image is instead a set of dom nodes, it cuts that extra HTTP request out, making your website faster and more user friendly.
An SVG XML document of any complexity looks relatively archaic and complicated, and seemingly isn't nearly as easy as just using an image.
I'm trying to design a poster using HTML, currently CSS allows me to get a huge canvas (90cmx200cm), but I can't get a document to send for printing.
Chromium does not allow using custom paper size and Firefox let me use the required size (on non-standard inches) but fails miserably to render a high quality PDF (Even 20px text that looks good when browsing w/o zoom).
I was thinking that I should be able to get a lower level interaction with the renderer to get this done.
The output format is irrelevant as long as it's portable enough.
Is there a way to achieve this?
There are a few things you need to know. Firstly print quality is related to dots-per-inch. Best software and printer in the world isn't going to make a 100 x 100 pixels photo print quality.
http://www.vsellis.com/understanding-dpi-resolution-and-print-vs-web-images/
Images on web pages are rasterized images, and typically quite low resolution (compressed formats such as JPEG and PNG to reduce bandwidth use). You might try using high-resolution images and scaling them with CSS (I have not idea how this will print though).
Make sure all of your text is actually text (don't use images).
To improve quality ensure images are high resolution. If possible you could explore using SVG, which is a loss-less format for diagrams and line drawings. I believe this should be preserved if you print to PDF. There are also third party libraries that convert SVG to PDF.
I work for a company that's going through a website redesign, and the designers have sent me a PSD file with mockups of the static pages. This is a typical parallax scrolling type deal that seems to be all the rage right now, and there are some large images in the mockup that will end up on the site.
I've chopped out the relevant graphics from the PSD and saved them with JPG where I don't need transparency, however I'm forced to use PNG when I do and some of these images are pushing 500kb in size resulting in the page size totaling about 3 megabytes, and I'm not even done! This is also being saved with Photoshop's "Save for Web" feature.
Considering over half our traffic comes from mobile devices, this is a big problem. What are some good techniques to cut down on the size of these images?
Your first step should be to go back to the designers, tell them the design is too heavyweight and work with them to find a way to load fewer, lighter images.
Tools like PNGGauntlet and ImageOptim can help reduce the size of PNGs (and JPGs). They tend to get a better (smaller) result than just Save for Web alone.
Lazy loading images so they only get downloaded when they scroll into view is another technique to look into. Where possible, use built-in CSS tools such as gradients, shadows, and the like. Maybe a vector format like SVG can be used for some of the images?
And, as Kobus Myburgh hinted, you can use CSS media queries to load smaller background images on smaller screens. If they're all background images, you might be able to get away with stretching smaller ones (using CSS background-size) on larger screens. Foreground images are trickier, but something like picturefill or a srcset polyfill might do the trick.
I believe what you're looking for is "responsive images". Read more here for techniques to solve:
https://github.com/scottjehl/picturefill
This is but one example of responsive images. There are many out there. Try Googling the term.
Try some lossless compression techniques .
Reference :
Lossless compression of images
I'm looking to use an SVG logo for a website — to make it look great on a responsive design for all devices.
But since there are issues, I want to support as many devices and browsers as possible. Load speed is also an important consideration. How do export settings in Adobe Illustrator fit into all this?
In Illustrator, there are several options for SVG export. Firstly, which SVG profile is best?
I assume SVG Tiny has a lower file size? Do many devices support SVG Tiny? What are the most important differences? (Without having to read this W3 monster.)
Secondly, I assume that the best option for image location is "link"? (See description after exclamation mark.)
Alternatively, how is browser support for the "embed" option?
Thank you!
P.S. There will be a fallback alpha-PNG option, but I want the SVG to
be supported as best as possible. (Come to think of it, a fallback
option — like a JPG — would probably be the best served in this case since alpha-PNG itself needs a solution for older IE.)
Update: There are also more options that can be configured. I am not working with text, so the only relevant one I see is the decimal places. For logos, something to be displayed as maximum 200x200px (so 400x400px on Retina displays), is "3" the best setting? Or "2" to minimize file size?
SVG profiles
SVG 1.0: all modern desktop and mobile browsers support SVG 1.1, so never choose this option.
SVG 1.1: You will almost always want this.
SVG Tiny/Basic: this is a subset of SVG intended for mobile devices. Only a handful of devices support SVG Tiny and not the full spec, so go for SVG 1.1.
Note: SVG Tiny does not reduce the file size, it's just a subset of SVG that is adequate for low processing power devices. It will discard gradients, opacity, embedded fonts and filters.
Erik Dahlström says:
All SVG 1.1 full viewers should be able to display all of the SVG 1.1
Tiny/Basic content (according to spec), and probably all of the SVG
1.2 Tiny content that Illustrator produces too.
Fonts note: if you don't have any text in your image this setting doesn't matter.
Adobe CEF: never use this option of you intend to display it in browsers. It's Adobe's way of embedding fonts in SVG files, as far as I know this is only supported by Adobe's SVG viewer plugin.
SVG: this embeds the font as SVG, which is not supported by Firefox, but is a good option if you intend to support only mobile devices (which usually run webkit).
Create outlines: you will want to do this most of the time, unless you have a large amount of text. If you have a large amount of text you will want to embed the font with WOFF but you will have to do this by hand.
Subsetting:
None: this will negate the previous setting and will not embed any font, if you don't care that the font falls back to some other font in the user's computer choose this.
Only Glyphs used: you will want this most of the time if you choose to embed the font. It only embeds the characters used so it doesn't inflate your file size.
[rest of subsetting]: this is fairly clear, you can choose to include the entire font or subsets of it. It is only useful if your SVG is dynamic and the text might change based on user input.
Images: this only matters if you are including bitmap images
Embed: this is usually what you want, it encodes the image as a data uri so that you just upload one file instead of the svg file with it's companion bitmap images.
Link: use this only if you have several svg files that reference one bitmap file (so it's not downloaded every time it renders the svg file).
Note that linked bitmap images won't display if the SVG is displayed through the <img> tag, because img doesn't allow loading external resources. Furthermore: webkit has a bug that does not display bitmap images within svg files even if you embed them. In short: use a plain <svg> tag if you intend to embed or link bitmap images, don't use <img>.
Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities
I prefer to save an .ai file as my source image, and to think of the SVG file as an Export for web feature. That way you focus on reducing file size and have a pristine copy of your vector file with all the editing capabilities. So don't choose this.
Decimal Places
The default 3 is a sane setting and you can mostly forget about it.
However, if you have a really complicated paths with many points lowering this setting to 1 or even 0 will reduce the file size substantially. But you must be careful because bezier segments are very sensitive to this setting and they might seem a little distorted. So if you lower this setting always make sure it looks acceptable in a browser.
Encoding
The explanation behind character encoding is rather technical, and it only concerns svg files with text. The most likely encoding you need is UTF-8, do not change this unless you know what you're doing.
Include slicing data
This adds metadata bloat to your SVG file, unless you plan on opening your SVG file later in Illustrator and finding your slices (if you have them), do not check this
Include XMP
More metadata regarding the file, you can read on XMP here. do not check this
Responsive
Take note that this setting will eliminate the height and width property from your svg root node, assuming you will scale the included graphic via css. In some instances however, you want the individual graphic to declare it's size. Make sure to uncheck this setting in these instances.
Output fewer <tspan> elements
This will be grayed out if you don't have text. SVG does not support kerning tables, so, certain character sequences will seem too spaced out, i.e. AVA. Illustrator works around by adding tspan elements and tweaking character positions a bit. This adds a bit of bloat to the file do not check this unless you care more about file size than text appearance.
Use <textpath> element for text on a path
This will be grayed out if you don't have text on a path. Browsers tend to vary a lot when it comes to placing text on a path, so Illustrator tries to be helpful by applying the rotation and position to the character instead of leaving the job to the browser. do not check this unless you care more about file size than text appearance.
In general, I'd recommend you to look into SVG in general, you will find that it looks a lot like HTML and it allows you to tweak things that cannot be done within Illustrator.
Update to #methodofaction 's excellent explanation.
The export options have changed a little in the current version of Illustrator.
Adobe SVG Viewer is no longer a thing.
But more importantly there is a new setting "responsive" that is checked by default I believe. Take note that this setting will eliminate the height and width property from your svg root node, assuming you will scale the included graphic via css. In some instances however, you want the individual graphic to declare it's size. Make sure to uncheck this setting in these instances.
I have a site which uses a large image as a background. It's a jpeg that's 134KB in size - I can't really get it below that so far. I have saved it for web in photoshop on low quality jpeg setting. It's dimensions are: 1920 x 1028.
How can I reduce the size further?
Could I resize it extremely small and resize it with width and height attributes in the image tag - as long as the aspect ratio is the same?
Its killing my page speed. Please help - any advice welcome.
Without knowing the picture I can provide different ways:
1)
If you dont want your picture to be too prominent in the background, try to blur it (could be a lot - depending on the picture!) -> then you can us a higher compression rate without seeing the artifacts too much.
2)
depending on your picture, try to reduce it to certain color-ranges (that you use a max. amount of colors) -> with this method you might end up using a .png or gif file, photoshop will show you what is best.
One last thought:
As this is you BACKGROUND image, try to keep it in 'the back' - this way you can try and alter (destroy) the image in a way to reduce colors! On the other hand, try using smaller pictures (800x600) and let css scale them, again - depending on your intention.
I use 1280x1024px bg-images at about 55Kb.
hope this helps.
Try smushing it http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
Yes, you can use a smaller image. Your main options are
resize it on display (using something like <img
src="xxx" height="200%" width="200%">)
tile it
If it is a uniform background (pattern or similar), tiling probably looks nicer, as scaling up the image will degrade its visual quality. If it is a picture, you'll have to scale it.
I would definitely recommend resizing the image but keeping the aspect ratio. The smaller the better. Keep in mind however, that the smaller you go (less than 1:1), will reduce image quality. Having said that, generally image quality isn't mandatory to be super high for most backgrounds.
use Photoshop for resizing and make it according to your need such as 1024*800 or whatever u want,and then save it for web and device and there reduce the Optimized value of jpg hope it will work.
Unless you're willing to reduce the image's pixel resolution (like suggested by #sleske), there is probably no way to get image size much beyond what you have now. Photoshop's JPG export filter is top of the line in terms of quality vs. file size.
The only possible method could be splitting the image into sub-images, and compressing them with different settings ("slicing"). Large homogeneous areas can be saved at massively reduced quality without much visible loss, while detailed areas can retain higher quality. I think Photoshop has ImageReady for that.
If possible, save it as a GIF. GIFs are generally smaller than Jpegs.
you can use this online tool to reduce the size of image from MBs to KBs http://www.jpegmini.com/
I found a simple solution. It is to use office photo editor 2010 . just launch the application navigate to the directory with the images and simply click edit pictures on the right and then compress pictures . select what type you want i chose website. Successfully reduced size of jpg from 5mb to 50kb .
I tried many online image compressors but I liked this one most: http://compressimage.toolur.com/. You can play with various things like quality, compression methods etc.
You could have your server gzip images before sending in an htaccess file. (Assuming you run Apache)
If you have a lot of images, it could be intensive on your server's processor though.