Why JPEGs are like McDonalds Apple Pies (and SVGs are not)
Last week we looked at a simple, free SVG editor called Boxy SVG ( it’s here in case you missed it). I want to follow on from that today. But first, here’s an idea to consider…
“SVG isn’t an image format — it’s more of an image recipe”
And that makes it very different from all the pixel-based formats we’ve used in the past. Let me explain.
You could think of our classic pixel-shuffling image formats — JPEGs, GIFs and PNGs — as being like those McDonald’s Apple Pies. Each comes packaged in precisely fixed amounts. You can’t ask the McDonalds serving staff to whip you up a ‘family-sized’ pie or to rustle up a ‘half-slice’ to have with your coffee.
Well, technically, you CAN ask but you’ll get a very strange look.
It’s a reasonable serving for one person, but if you need to share with 2, 3 or more people, you need to stretch your little pie a long way — i.e. everyone gets less.
But SVG is like having a really good apple pie recipe.
You hold the instructions to make as much or as little pie as you want.
Sure, there are numerical amounts written into the recipe — 8 apples, 4 cups of flour and so on. But if you need to feed twice as many people, you just double the measurements. If you want to feed half as many — just halve the numbers. Recipes are designed to scale.
And because you control how the pie is made, you can even customize your basic pie recipe for different people’s needs. Maybe Nanna likes a handful of black currants in her pie. Your brother loves custard. Small, thoughtful changes to the original recipe are easy and valuable.
Of course, the ‘S‘ part in ‘SVG’ stands for ‘scalable’, and it’s part of what makes SVG so useful for the web. But ‘scalability‘ — by itself — doesn’t always mean ‘more usable’. Sometimes we need to change how our layouts are displayed. SVG can help us.
Making Charts with SVG
Here’s an SVG chart that I created using Boxy SVG. It shows the number of mentions of the phrase ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Star Wars’ in books since 1960 (* Data via Google NGRAM).
You might typically see this type of chart online as a JPEG or PNG — in fact, you can export it from Boxy SVG as a PNG if you wanted to.
So, why not make it a JPG and be done with it?
Good question.
Reason #1: Compare the File Sizes
- The JPEG version is 47kb. (JPEG link)
- The raw SVG version from Boxy SVG is 14kb (SVG link).
- With a little tidying, I got it down to 10kb (SVG link).
The Boxy SVG chart isn’t perfect out of the box. View the source and you’ll see:
- some extra empty TSPANs in the text labels
- the extreme precision makes numbers longer and more unwieldy than they need to be (tools like SVGO can fix this for you)
- elements moved inside the Boxy editor tend to get transforms added to their original X & Y positions. Ideally any repositioning would be made to those original X & Y co-ordinates.
- there are lots of inline properties that can be safely moved to a STYLE block at the top of the document — more on that next week
All of this is interesting for SVG nerds, but not terribly important for designers wanting to use Boxy SVG.
Even leaving those small issues untouched, the Boxy SVG code is cleaner and easy-to-read than anything else that exports SVG that I’ve worked with. A little bit of find-and-replace resolved those issues in five minutes.
Of course, either of the SVG files above will still be laser crisp at 2000px (if required) with no increase in file size. The JPEG certainly wouldn’t.
Still, internet speeds are fast — we’re not going to fight over 30kb between friends, are we?
Reason #2: SVG has Non-Scaling Strokes
This is an SVG trick that I only became aware of yesterday.
While it’s always handy to be able to squish down our images to fit it into a small screen, there’s a point where our line-work legibility simply breaks down. Similarly, highly scaled-up image lines can become fat and oafish.
Unfortunately, that’s simply an unsolvable problem in our PNGs and JPGs. We just have to live with it.
Non-scaling Strokes
But SVG has a cool, built-in solution to this issue — a path property called vector-effect= “non-scaling-stroke”. This property makes any line it is applied to appear the same width, regardless of any image scaling.
Scale your browser up and down and you’ll notice that the yellow Star Wars line stays the same width, while everything scales.
Try getting your JPEG to do that.
To make this work in the SVG code, we’d need to manually add vector-effect= “non-scaling-stroke” to the correct ‘path’.
But happily, Boxy SVG makes it easy to use non-scaling strokes right in the editor.
Start by selecting the path that you need to prevent from scaling. In the right-hand STROKE panel, just below the ‘width’ setting, you’ll find a small ‘Non-scaling stroke’ checkbox. That’s all there is to it.
Now, of course, in many scenarios you may prefer your line to scale — that is still the default behaviour. But, as you can imagine, this is a particularly useful feature to use with maps, graphs, and charts.
In some ways, this is a marginal feature for Boxy SVG. Few people (myself included) seem to be even aware that ‘non-scaling strokes‘ is a part of the SVG spec.
But the fact that Jarek Foksa — Boxy SVG’s maker — not only knows about it but elegantly builds it into his Boxy user interface, gives me great confidence he really knows what he’s doing. We’ve spoken over email and he has some fantastic plans in store.
I’m really looking forward to where he takes this app in the coming months.
Originally published in the SitePoint Design Newsletter.
