Re: Documentation and explanatory diagrams

On Jul 3, 2010, at 4:16 PM, Robert Haas wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 3, 2010 at 7:14 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>>> Seems like a good one. But I'd still like to know the answer to the
>>> question I asked upthread - how is anyone supposed to generate images
>>> this way?
>>
>> Hmm, judging from
>> http://live.gnome.org/Dia
>>
>> the answer is that .dia files aren't meant to be human readable but only
>> to be a storage format for WYSIWYG editing. I find this less than
>> thrilling: it essentially means you *can't* edit the images any other
>> way than using dia. (I'd bet a nickel that any small change results in
>> massive changes in the file contents, too, which will be un-fun for
>> keeping them in a VCS.)
>
> Anyone know of any other alternatives we could investigate?

SVG is one option.

Natively supported in all web browsers but one (and that has a
workaround), vector based, and there are a bunch of editors for it.

There are several rasterizers to png, I'm not sure which would be
least painful as part of a build chain.

( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:%24wgSVGConverters )

Cheers,
Steve