Hi, Peter. I know you were sort of asking this of Daniel, but I'll take
a few minutes to lay it out if that's all right.
"Some day, and in a new thread, I would like you to explain me this
vector graphics thing. You mention it a lot and you mention a lot that
draw and Impress are both built with it or something like that, and I
don't fully understand what vector graphics are and why they are so
important."
There are two kinds of computer graphics -- raster and vector. Raster is
nothing more than a big grid of dots of various colors that make up a
picture. It's the kind of graphics you get with TV or digital cameras.
Examples with computers are jpeg, png, gif, and tiff.
On the other hand, vector graphics amount to mathematical descriptions
of objects like lines, rectangles, circles, etc.
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.
Rod
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