SVG Pottery: pottery drawings on the Web
SVG Pottery is a set of best practices, how-tos and recommendations
to ease the process of publishing pottery drawings on the Web.
In short we strongly recommend that:
- you publish your drawings on the Web, and not just on paper, not
just inside a PDF article, but on their own
- you use SVG as the format for publishing your drawings
The rest of this documentation goes into the details of why and how,
and explores some issues and possibilities with this model. You can
just go ahead and start using SVG if you like.
Some software tools are also being developed
to assist archaeologists
with simple, quick ways
to publish their drawings on the Web.
This documentation is maintained in a Mercurial repository at bitbucket.
Why SVG?
Or, in other words, why not another vector graphics format, like DXF,
DWG, PDF or Adobe Illustrator’s?
- SVG is an open standard defined by the W3C
- all modern browsers support directly visualising SVG
- lots of vector graphics software support editing SVG
- SVG is XML, and this brings several advantages like
- ability to do manual editing with a text editor
- availability of advanced processing tools
- ease of translation to other formats, both vector and raster
- SVG is part of official recommendations and guidelines:
- it is one of the two preferred formats for vector graphics
at the Archaeology Data Service (together with DWG)
- it is the only recommended format for vector graphics
in the MINERVA EC Guidelines for Digital Cultural Content Creation Programmes
- unfortunately the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut
still doesn’t mention SVG
in their IT-Leitfaden (recommendations)
Which SVG version?
The SVG version described here is SVG 1.1,
the current W3C recommendation.