Commons:Graphics village pump/September 2008

tried simple theora encoder on mp4 (h.264/aac)... video seemed fine when resulting file was played in VLC, but I could not hear audio.

In trying to convert a mp4 (h.264/aac) to ogg (theora/vorbis) I noticed that Simple Theora Encoder seemed to convert the video fine, but there was no audio. There was a comment on Help:Converting Video - Wikimedia Commons (to the effect that there has not been success converting Quicktime files with audio tracks). Are there any workarounds? -- 16:30, 13 September 2008 96.245.75.129

Image:Darwins tree of life 1859.gif

Darwins tree of life 1859.gif

Does this image have any advantages over the bigger one, Image:Darwin divergence.jpg? (Thus is there any real reason to keep it?) How could "Darwin divergence" be improved?

This illustration is the only one in The Origin of Species, one of the most important books ever published; it would be nice to make it a featured picture, or at least get it to the best possible quality. It seems to me that the resolution could be better, and perhaps we should have both a colour and grayscale version. However, I seem to have lost my ability to scan at high resolution (setting the possibility of appealing to get it back somehow) at my university, so I probably can't help. Richard001 (talk) 08:38, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

Language specific SVG

I'm posting this here because I have no idea where a Wikimedia programmer would be around to ask him about it. A fellow graphicist tried out a neat way to produce multi-lingual SVGs. The code is pretty simple:

<defs>
	<symbol id="at-contact" class="head"><switch>
		<text y="20" systemLanguage="de">Kontakt</text>
		<!-- other language versions -->
		<text y="20">contact</text>
	</switch></symbol>
	<!-- ... -->
</defs>
<use xlink:href="#at-contact" x="10" y="145" />

And, hey, librsvg does support that! So, shouldn't it in principle be possible to exploit this for the production of language-specific PNG versions? All the servers needed to know was the (default) language of the Wiki page the grafic will be used in and pass it to the renderer command. Additionally, it could be triggered with a ?uselang=.. parameter on the adress line. Previews of different sizes are allready produced now on-demand. Where would be the difference to make additional language-specific versions?

So, what do you think? Should we make this a feature request? --Hk kng (talk) 13:46, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

What happens if you load such a file into inkscape and save? I'm not suggesting anything, I simply want to know, because support in editors has to exist before anything can be done. --Ayacop (talk) 14:03, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

If you save it as "Inkscape SVG", the structure is preserved. Saving as "Normal SVG" leads to an exchange of the <switch> tag with a <g> tag. (Clearly a bug, since <switch> is a regular part of the SVG specs at least since Version 1.0) The different language specific objects remain and are, as a result, displayed on top of each other.

You are right. There's a problem. On the other hand, SVG graphicists have to learn so many quirks of the editors and renderers, what is one more? And I was generally thinking of opening up a way of adding language versions via script (like http://toolserver.org/~nikola/svgtranslate.php) --Hk kng (talk) 12:28, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

I've just reported the bug as https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/269390 --Hk kng (talk) 12:47, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

display SVG directly in wikipedia

According to Help:SVG#How_SVGs_work_in_MediaWiki, every SVG is converted to .png picture to display in Wikipedia article. I'm wondering if there is a way to display the SVG pictures directly without the convertion.(somewhere in personal settings for example) I have the requirement because all my browsers(opera or fx) have support SVG natively.--Wihwang (talk) 10:15, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I think it's converted to PNG since some browsers (like IE) don't support SVG or some (like FireFox) have incomplete SVG support. Wikipedia's article on SVG has a discussion about who supports SVG: w:Scalable_Vector_Graphics#Support_for_SVG_in_web_browsers J.smith (talk) 20:56, 27 September 2008 (UTC)