SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics

SVG is a graphics format that bases on XML . I see two applications of SVG in musical notation:

• It is ideal to integrate music notation with small files with high quality into the WWW (as a replacement for gif; jpeg isn't well suited for music notation anyhow) and to print the same data with high quality.
• It is an ideal replacement for music fonts . Using Java , one can run programs on almost all platforms - but one can't rely that there is an installed music font or even that one is installable. Using SVG, a music notation program can bring along all necesary music notation symbols.

SVG is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium

SVG is a prefered format for pictures anc vector graphics in wikipedia.org und wikibooks.org As soon as music notation programs and midi programs can export single measures and tablatures as SVG files, this files could be used as high quality files in many wiki projects.

If you know music notation programs that export to SVG, please let me know. Several people expressed interest in this topic.

There are so many SVG resources on the Web, I can't list them all.

• SVG phones
• SVG Implementation and Resource Directory
• A current compilation of vector graphic programs supporting but not limited to SVG for Windows, Macs and Linux (August 2005).
• W3C lists news, tools, articles on SVG.
• Exploring the W3C's Scalable Vector Graphics language: Sacre SVX at xml.com
• For programmers: Apache Batik in Java . This also contains an SVG viewer.

There is a change in the SVG draft of 29 June 2000:
Made the 'unicode' attribute on the 'glyph' element #IMPLIED to allow for definition of glyphs which do not have corresponding code points in Unicode. Such glyphs can only be accessed via the 'altGlyph' facility.

This is good especially for music notation symbols, since the UNICODE people don't want graphical symbols inside UNICODE: Unicode is for symbols that are used in a text line. This is what the symbols 1D100 - 1D1FF are intended for. These symbols are not intended for notation symbols that are placed 2-dimensional in a graphical music notation editor.

Programs exporting SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics: muscriptps2svg Muscript to SVG converter Perl LilyPond - music notation program Linux, Red Hat i386, LinuxPPC, SuSE, Shockware, Mandrake, Debian, Mac OS X, Darwin, NetBSD, Solaris, AIX, Windows MusiqueXML Linux dvisvgm dvi (TeX) to SVG converter Linux, Windows

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