Re: Are centimeters second class units?

Elliotte,

At 08:34 AM 12/11/00 -0500, Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
>I'm still working my way through the SVG spec so I'm hoping I've missed 
>something and someone will correct me. However, I've been through the 
>coordinate section several times, and it's beginning to look to me like 
>pixels have a very privileged place in the SVG universe. In particular 
>paths, polylines, polygons and probably some other things are all 
>effectively defined in terms of pixels. The non-dimensional units used in 
>the points attributes of these elements are all defined in user 
>coordinates, and user coordinates are pixels. There are a lot of times 
>when it would be much more convenient to define these quantities in terms 
>of real-world units like cm or mm or in.

The SVG working group is aware of the fact that paths, polylines and 
polygons don't allow for CSS units.


>I can use various transforms to stretch or compress the coordinate system 
>and thereby scale the connection between user coordinates and screen 
>pixels. However, what I want to do, and can't seem to figure out how to 
>do; is map-like scaling; e.g. I want to say that one kilometer in local 
>coordinates equals one centimeter on the screen. For instance, if I draw a 
>line that's 10000 cm long I'd like it to take up 1 cm on the screen. I 
>can't seem to do this without an intermediate transformation into pixels, 
>which introduces questions of local screen resolution. I want to specify 
>everything in terms of units that don't change from one monitor to the 
>next. The renderer knows how many pixels there are per inch when it draws 
>a picture. I don't know that, and indeed I can't know that because it will 
>be different from system to system.

The Adobe SVG Viewer has logic to determine how large a screen pixel is, 
but it gets its information from the operating environment, whose accuracy 
varies. Note that most monitors have controls that allow you to squeeze or 
expand the area on the screen onto which the system draws. These 
adjustments are not currently known to the Adobe SVG Viewer. Thus, the best 
you can get is an approximation.

But if you are willing to accept those limitations, then you might be able 
to do what you want. If you have a standalone SVG file (i.e., not embedded 
inside an HTML page), then set the 'width' and 'height' attributes to some 
know dimension in cm. The Adobe SVG Viewer (and other conforming 
implementations) should attempt to render into a viewport of exactly the 
size you specify. Then, place a 'viewBox' attribute to achieve the desired 
scale factor. For example:

    <svg width="20cm" height="30cm" viewBox="0 0 20000 30000">

The picture will be shown in an area that is 20cm-by-30cm, but scaled by 
1000, so 1000 units in your drawing will render as 1cm on the screen.


>There are some related issues I've encountered too. For instance, I tried 
>to use a viewBox in Batik that had a width and height of 10 each in an svg 
>element that was 10cm square so that 1 in the user coordinates would equal 
>1 cm. However, the user coordinates seemed stuck with at most one pixel 
>per user coordinate. That is, although each unit in the user coordinate 
>space should have mapped to roughly 30 pixels, it in fact mapped to 
>exactly one pixel. In other words the ratio of pixels/coordinate is less 
>than or equal to 1. I'm not sure if this is a flaw in Batik or in my 
>understanding of SVG.

I'm not sure I understand. But did you try this in the Adobe viewer?


>If SVG really doesn't allow me to describe shapes with arbitrary precision 
>fixed units of known length like cm and in, rather than the very ambiguous 
>pixel unit, then it seems seriously underpowered and unsuitable for many 
>tasks. Some of the basic shapes like rect and circle let me use real 
>units, but the most fundamental path element does not. How can I define a 
>path that's a certain number of centimeters long? Any ideas? Am I missing 
>something here?

I gave one idea above. Does this help?

Jon Ferraiolo
SVG Editor
jferraio@adobe.com

>--
>
>+-----------------------+------------------------+-------------------+
>| Elliotte Rusty Harold | elharo@metalab.unc.edu | Writer/Programmer |
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Received on Monday, 11 December 2000 22:39:45 UTC