The Greys

Mark – one half of the creative team behind ‘The Greys’ and ‘Monsters, Inked’ comics – is writing a series of Inkscape tutorials for Full Circle Magazine. The first is a sort of prequel to the main series, introducing the SVG file format, and can be found in issue #60.

Full Circle Magazine is available to download free of charge. It’s primarily a Ubuntu Linux magazine, but the Inkscape tutorials are largely applicable to Windows and MacOS users, too.

These tutorials will start with the very basics of Inkscape, and over time will expand to cover some of the more complex and powerful features of the software we use to create our comics. Many of the tricks and tips we’ve picked up over the past three years will feature throughout the series.

So if you fancy creating your own comic strip, or just want some behind-the-scenes insight into how we do it, start by downloading issue #60 now and follow along with future editions.

Microsoft recently released a developer preview of what is to come in Internet Explorer 9, and I’m pleased to say that they’re (finally) starting to seriously catch up with all the other browser manufacturers when it comes to modern web standards support.

Of particular relevance to this site is that they will (finally) support SVG natively in the browser. This is a huge advance for SVG as a standard, as the lack of native IE support is one thing that has been seriously impeding its uptake. It will be a few years yet before old versions of IE become irrelevant, though, so don’t expect to see SVG all over the place any time soon.

If you’re a web developer, you might want to check out Ars Technica’s article about the release. It’s one of the better articles, as is usually the case with Ars Technica, and worth a read if it’s the kind of thing that interests you.

When you get to the SVG section in that article there’s a table showing what level of support is present in the developer preview, and what level of support they anticipate having in the final product. Unfortunately it looks like SVG filters won’t make the cut.

Inkscape provides a handy “blur” slider in the Fill and Stroke dialogue which is actually a simple front-end to SVG’s “feBlur” filter. Because of that, every Greys comic contains at least that filter. The most recent Inkscape release also adds a useful “Filters” menu, pre-populated with plenty of interesting filter chains that can be applied to any object with just a couple of clicks. Consequently we’ve been using SVG filters more and more in The Greys.

Hopefully Microsoft will at least implement feBlur, as that’s widely used in SVG files. After that… well, you won’t be able to see our SVG files in all their glory in IE for some time yet, but bravo to Microsoft for taking a step in the right direction, and we’ll keep our fingers crossed for version 10.

I was reading Planet Ubuntu yesterday, and came across this blog entry about a particular use of SVG in the browser. In the comments someone mentioned an application called Scour for cleaning and sanitising SVG files. This was a new app to me, so I thought I’d mention it here.

The SVG files we make available for download are the original Inkscape files. Occasionally the addition of an Easter Egg requires subsequent hand-editing of the file, but we always ensure that the resultant file will still load into Inkscape and remain at least close to the design of the original un-edited file. The reason for distributing Inkscape SVG files – rather than plain SVG files – is that we would like people to be able to load, modify and re-use our files without losing any useful data.

For some uses, however, it might be beneficial for you to have a sanitised version of the SVG file – one without the Inkscape-specific extensions which might trip up another application. That’s what Scour does – it strips out the Inkscape metadata and possibly modifies the structure of the file to produce something that is smaller and simpler, but which should render the same way as the original file.

So if you want to do something with our SVG files but are having trouble opening them in your application of choice, why not try Scouring them first.