Re: World of flags in SVG

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Chris Lilley wrote:
> This is a cool project.
>
> Its also a nice counterbalance to the recent scare about ISO charging
> for using two-letter country codes (they scrapped that idea, by the
> way).

It sure is.  We love seeing this idea strike such a strong chord with
the community.

> Is this project ready to be more widely announced?

It certainly is.  We seem to have weathered the first deluge of
submissions pretty well.  The community is doing a great job of helping
us verify colors, dimensions, etc. on the flags and make needed
corrections.  That is really where the bulk of the labor is, and being
able to depend on the community to take care of it has made this
possible.

Uraeus and myself have been able to handle the volume of submissions so
far without too much difficulty.  We're kind of figuring the process out
as we go.  Lawrence Lessig has been very helpful with advice as to how
to correctly Public Domain the submissions.

> CS> I just thought that you guys would be happy to know that there is now a
> CS> rather large collection of high quality flags for free use available at:
> CS> http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/index.php3?section=gallery/flags
>
> For example, SVG clients that allow selection of the user prefered
> language (as does Batik, for example) might make use of these flags as
> one way to select the language.

*Nod*  One thing we've come to realize is that official flags come in
many different sizes, and we're hoping to provide a set of flags in
official aspect ratio as well as a standard ratio for ease of button
making.

> CS> We will also be making a tarball/zipfile containing these flags for easy
> CS> downloading.
>
> CS> Our hope is that this can become a good resource for people writing
> CS> schoolpapers, newspapers, websites and so on.
>
> May I suggest an alphabetical index in addition to the existing
> numerical one?

Yes, that is a good suggestion.  We have already received a new php
report tool from a project participant, but haven't had a chance to
migrate the flags over into it.  Maybe this weekend...  (Curse day
jobs!)  Our hope with providing the tarball is that others can take the
raw collection and present it in a great variety of ways.  I'd love to
see something that displays all of the flags in a single image.  :-)

> CS> Of course if people here want to contribute more flags that would
> CS> be great.
>
> (Checks to see that Scotland is there ... yep you are all set ;-)
>
> A few more spot checks ...
> http://flagspot.net/flags/ca-nu.html
> is missing - yes there is work to do there.

It's surprising how many more flags are left to go, even just to capture
all the recognized nations of the world.  When one starts to think about
all the states, provinces, and cities...

> Congratulations to whoever drew
> http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/showsvg.php3?file=gallery/flags/saudiarabia.svg
> that is some complex letterwork.

Some of the more complex flags are produced programmatically; judging
from the layout of the SVG document I suspect this one was produced in
this fashion.  A good job none-the-less.  :-)

Bryce

Received on Thursday, 30 October 2003 21:56:54 UTC