[Psymon]

Re...

Originally Posted by Jellby

It should be possible to make the SVG transparent too, and with some luck to take the surrounding text colour.

...and...

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Looking at the svg file itself I see the canvas/view port specified enable background. I have never seen that before and suspect it may be causing the issue, perhaps to avoid a black on black condition with the lines and text.

If there's a way to get the SVG transparent, I haven't got a clue how. I made those in Adobe Illustrator (CS6), and you'd think that if any program could do it, then that could -- but this morning I searched all over the 'net for a tutorial on "transparent svg illustrator" and just couldn't find one. Indeed, if anything, what I found was various discussion boards where they said you can't make an SVG transparent.

It wouldn't surprise me, though, if there's some freeware proggie out there somewhere that I could run my Illustrator-made SVG file through and make them transparent (i.e. do what my $600 program can't!). Seems like half of everything I do is in freeware proggies that can do what expensive, paid-for software can't.

Originally Posted by DaleDe

SVG is vector imaging and PNG is raster/bitmap imaging check our wiki for details at Graphics. the text is real text in SVG and is searchable and scalable.

Yeah, I do understand the difference between raster and vector images, although in these music images I've done all the text is part of the image -- I made the vector (SVG) files from one, single raster (PSD) image. I've had Illustrator for years now, but simply never had any occasion to use it until now -- in fact, I didn't even have it installed until the other day -- so although I know Photoshop inside-out, I'm virtually a newbie to Illustrator. :/

The only relevant "text" in these music images is the lyrics, basically -- I don't imagine people would be doing a search for "Andante" or "cresc." or "p" or "f" or something -- and I was going to write out, in text, the full lyrics after the music itself (the music only contains the first stanza). So that would still be searchable, of course.

SVG is fully supported in ePub 2 and ePub 3 but not the old mobi format although it is supported in KF8.

Oh, well, although I was only planning on publishing this in epub, I was going to basically give it away for free, and so I could certainly see that people might want to convert it to MOBI format (or whatever), so isn't that an argument in favour of not using SVG, and just going with PNG instead?

As to scaling PNG, JPG, GIF etc scale by taking the image pixels and duplicating some number of them at the new resolution. It can cause jaggies in the image. SVG on the other hand draws the image at the new resolution.

Yeah, I know, but my PNG versions were reasonably large enough (i.e. hi-res enough) that those "jaggies" are virtually imperceptible, it's only when you make a smaller image larger than it's supposed to be that you really start to see stuff like that happen, but not when you take a large image and display it at a smaller size. I can hardly tell the difference at all between the SVG and the PNG version of the same image.

For all the above reasons, I really have to wonder why I'm going through all this time/effort to get these done up in SVG format, just so that I can end up with images that pretty much look exactly the same as the PNGs would, are not transparent (at least, as far as I can figure out, using Illustrator to make them), and less compatible if/when someone converts the book from epub format.

Seriously, aren't I better off just doing them up as PNGs instead?

(PS. Thanks for the nice comment/feedback, DomesticExtremis!)

EDIT: Oh, and here's another reason to go with PNG instead of SVG. When I did up that one measure in colour, both in PNG and SVG format (and with exactly the same pixel dimensions), the PNG was only 18k in size, whereas the SVG was 325k! That's almost 20x the file size!