just wondering a few things ..(if anyone can help)
1)does inkscape have a feather effect?
Also i have been poking around illustrator and also xara and i have another question...

2) Is feathering by its nature always a raster effect?

Or have some apps managed to incorporated feathering into their vector formats I.E as an innate vector property....in the same way a blends are generally not raster effects..?

The reason i say this is that in illustrator applying a feather immediately pixelates things and this is obviously a rater effect here ...
But in xara regardless of your zoom level the feather is always perfect (like gradients are) so i would have to guess that in xara that feathering has native support in their vector format.....

so getting to the point:
3) the svg format.... what support does it offer re-feathering...blurring or even for gradient mesh type stuff...........are all these things possible under the umbrella of svg or would these things have to be raster effects.../tacked on ETC....?

You will find simple feathering in Filters/ABC/Feather

Then open the Filter Editor and change the blur amount.

A vector object is allways changed to a bitmap on the fly to display on screen (at your screen resolution of course).

ivan

Thanks for that ivan

Thats a shame really as im not a big fan of bitmap effects for vector...
I guess you could say im a vector purist....
Pixelation and vector should never mix LOL they are polar opposites...

Why would you put your darks in with your lights and put them through the wash....
That is madness...LOL

David Hewitt wrote:Pixelation and vector should never mix LOL they are polar opposites...

Any display device (TFT or LCD or OLED or anything else) is made of small pixel like units. There are no vector display devices. That's why rasterizing any image is the only solution for displaying.

That's the same for ink, laser or wax printing which use tiny drops, bubbles or powder blotches. However in this area there are some exceptions like plotters, which use directly vector information to move their drawing markers, and I suppose vinyl cutting devices also use directly vector info.

ivan

David Hewitt wrote:Thats a shame really as im not a big fan of bitmap effects for vector...I guess you could say im a vector purist....

The filter effect Ivan has mentioned is a vector effect, not a raster effect.

Sorry, I must correct myself, it's is raster but it's generated dynamically. So in most cases it's still very usable. Although I should think it's possible to create a pure vector version of a feather filter.

microUgly wrote:

David Hewitt wrote:Thats a shame really as im not a big fan of bitmap effects for vector...I guess you could say im a vector purist....

The filter effect Ivan has mentioned is a vector effect, not a raster effect.

Sorry, I must correct myself, it's is raster but it's generated dynamically. So in most cases it's still very usable. Although I should think it's possible to create a pure vector version of a feather filter.

Rendering engines always rasterize vector drawings on the fly. Otherwise how would you display them on screen ?

kindly,
ivan

ivan louette wrote:Any display device (TFT or LCD or OLED or anything else) is made of small pixel like units. There are no vector display devices. That's why rasterizing any image is the only solution for displaying.

This is true... but to qualify myself more... my gripe is not with hardware so much but software...(pixelation is not an issue with display hardware as you don't ever need to sit 2mms away from your display...but with vector zooming in ETC does not produce the same problem... and small elements can possibly be re-used and scaled up for larger applications...this flexibly being the hallmark of vector... something that goes out the window with raster effects.)

The thing that bugs me about a raster feather is that it is a grid of coloured squares and although this limitation can obviously be managed by way of ensuring the resolution is appropriate for the task, for vector this is not endearing as it contravenes the most definitive property of vector itself...
I.E that it is more "pure mathematically" and thus scalable.

The only problem with Inkscape rendering engine (here I am talking about the devel version) is not pixellisation. You can zoom in or resize any feathered object without seeing any grid of coloured squares. All what you will have is a well known banding problem linked to the limitation that at the moment Inkscape SVG filters rendering engine only uses 8 bits per colour component. But this is not a limitation of SVG itself. The same kind of problem (with partly the same origin and also another one) occurs when you zoom in or rescale objects with diffuse or specular lighting applied ; then you will see some kind of topographic map effects because blur is used there as an height map.

Don't forget that Inkscape is a work in progress !

N.B. Perhaps could you also increase Blur and Filters display quality in Inkscape Preferences.

microUgly wrote:Sorry, I must correct myself, it's is raster but it's generated dynamically. So in most cases it's still very usable. Although I should think it's possible to create a pure vector version of a feather filter.

It sounds ok (i could not find it perhaps i dont have the latest version) anyway if pixelation was not visible this would ease my pain a little...
But i would still be uneasy with it.....

As for ivans suggestion that a true vector feather may be possible... this excites me...
raster effects are workarounds to real vector stuff in my view.... (with respect to feathering anyway...)
its good to have this capacity of those who do like mixing it up a little but not at the expense of the core genuine vector filters/effects.

but by that standard our blurs etc are vector, their defined as a function, and rendered as required...

Simarilius wrote:but by that standard our blurs etc are vector, their defined as a function, and rendered as required...

That was what i was asking....so it is a vector function then....(with-out getting too anal)

I guess i was comparing the xara feather to the illustrator one...
IE the xara feather looks the same quality zoomed in 1000% than it does at 1:1...which would suggest to me a that it fits the bill of your quote up top there...
Where as illustrator has visible pixelation...which is allot less elegant...

And im not sure what's under the hood of either app but i know which one i prefer....The seamless one!

And i want to see inkscape go down the right road...as i would eventually like to use it as my vector app of choice....(a few things are holding me back at the moment, from fully embracing it...but i have my issues with every app i use....(go figure...)