Bob Jamison wrote:
Jon A. Cruz wrote:
But there's a problem. What's a pixel??? Are we 90 DPI, 75 DPI, 72 DPI...?
That's right. No rasters here. ^^
No, not a problem. The user decides when they make the choice to save with rounded units.
I was thinking about this. Would someone really want to put an arbitrary limit on precision? What kind of granularity is proper?
Not an arbitrary limit, a user defined limit.
For example, this PDF highway map of California: http://gocalif.ca.gov/tourism/pdfs/Map_CAstate.pdf
Imaging this recast as SVG.
If its resolution were limited, then the macro image would be ok, but the fine detail would be illegible. One would not be able to zoom in and still have accurate lines, or font->curve conversion.
I think that image is a bad example. No one would want to reduce the precision of a detailed map. At least I wouldn't want to. Beautiful artistic pieces aren't in the running either. Let me dream up a few use cases.
#1 A Patern: I want to make a toy out of cardboard for a child. I choose to draw a patern for the toy in Inkscape because its bezier is easy to use. After I rough out the basic design I decided I should have been snapping to a grid every quarter inch so that it would have been easier to transfer on to the cardboard. Instead of grid snapping every point by hand, I use the reduce precision effect and snap all my points to the nearest quarter inch. (yes internally the effect needs to figure out how to round to the SVG User Unin nearest to a quarter inch.) Lost precision helps me.
#2 Outside Inkscape: Writing a program that uses SVG paths internally to represent various shapes perhaps hundreds map symbols. Using inkscape again because it is easy. In order to make file size smaller I would like to round all paths to the nearest .05 which I have decided is plenty of precision for my application.
Sure these are rare cases. That is why it should be an extension. I don't know if either of these things are what the original poster had in mind. But use two is one of the first things I found myself doing with Inkscape using electric guitar body shapes not map symbols. Perhaps reduced precision sounds to negative. How about float rounding or lossy float compression.
Aaron Spike