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From: Steve Atkins <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Images in the official documentation
Date: Sun, 25 Feb 2018 12:12:02 -0800
Message-ID: <[email protected]> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>


> On Feb 25, 2018, at 4:00 AM, Jürgen Purtz <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> As an addition to my mail from January 2016 concerning graphics (https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/568A9148.30303%40purtz.de) I propose to use SVG (after switching to XML) - but not an SVG which is generated by Inkscape or similar tools. Those editors generate very ugly and chatty commands. This form is not easy to read or understand. Therefore we shall use nothing but a simple text editor and write every line by our self. The process is divided into two parts:
> As a basis we shall develop an SVG library containing a bunch of "atomic" symbols of simple graphical elements (rectangle, arrow, ...) up to complex elements (magnetic disc, laptop, cloud, UML-elements, ...). The SVG routines creating those symbols shall accept parameters for position, size, rotation, colour, ... . This library shortens the individual SVG files, it ensures a consistent rendering of common graphical elements, it is diff-able, and it will reach a stable state - some day.
> 
> The real graphics shall use the elements of the library and add individual SVG elements. The rules for this part are the same as above: create SVG commands with vi (or similar), store it in git.
> If such an approach works (we must distribute the docs across a wide range of different systems, a proof-of-system is necessary) and the community accepts my proposal, I would like to work on the library-part - starting after finishing my actual project in about 6 weeks from now. The attached file contains a very first draft as of Jan. 2016.

Writing SVG by hand maybe doesn't seem the best idea.

I understand the attraction to people who want to store everything as diffable text, but images of this sort are unlikely to get updated by others, which means they're unlikely to be maintained as the things they're intended to document change. It also means that the people best suited to generating diagrams are the least likely to do so, and vice-versa.

Cheers,
  Steve

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