Re: Paper size

Andrew,
I have been arguing within the working group for years that SVG needs to 
include some sort of metadata about the preferred physical representation 
size for a given graphic. Yes, this is needed for print, but it is also 
needed for web workflows. Authoring tools such as Adobe Illustrator need to 
know how large a given image should be upon printing since the drawing 
surface shows a printed page metaphor and often a given graphic is sent to 
a printer. The current 'width'/'height' attributes on <svg> are typically 
set to 100%/100% so that they will expand to fill the viewport, which 
prevents these attributes from being used to represent preferred physical 
representation size.

A more general approach would be to allow arbitrary width/height instead of 
named page sizes such as A4, although perhaps a list of known page size 
keyword strings would be a nice convenience.

Jon Ferraiolo
Adobe Systems, Inc.

At 04:52 AM 8/11/2004, Andrew Main wrote:
>Proposal. Include a hint as to ideal size of paper in addition to the 
>viewPort specification
>
>Eg <svg width="100%" height="100%" paper="A4"
>
>Rationale
>
>Like many people with svg, I print SVG via a browser, and either show the 
>svg native, or embedded as an object in XHTML.  Because of that, I pretty 
>much always use the "100%" width and height, so that the graphic fills the 
>object space, or the browser print-out.
>
>If one uses, say for A4 paper, width="297mm" height="210mm" it displays 
>badly on a browser monitor.
>
>At the moment, the user agent is without a paper size hint when it prints.
>
>Hence my suggestion that a hint is added that indicates the intended paper 
>size.  Then if the user views in via browser, or on paper, the user-agent 
>can give the user more nearly what they want.
>
>The relevant part of the SVG Print Spec is
>
>
>5.1.2 Using percentage of viewport sizing
>
>
>
>If the SVG image size is specified as a percentage value, it is considered 
>to be a percentage of the available viewport. In such cases, the SVG Print 
>device chooses the default paper size.
>
>Andrew Main