I made a black and white only graphic, which I need to export really small (1"x1") and when I do so, I get a greyscale image. Is there any way to prevent this? I need clean black and white line art.
I thought the whole point of .svg was that I could shrink things and retain clarity...
am I asking too much of the software?


Thanks!
Chevee

Chevee wrote:Is there any way to prevent this?

It may be possible to improve the situation, but it depends what exactly you're aiming for. Are you exporting to PNG, or to some vector format? Are you going to print the image, or use it on a website, or something else? When you say "black and white", do you mean that you don't want any grey pixels at all, or do you just mean that you want it to look sharper?

I thought the whole point of .svg was that I could shrink things and retain clarity...

Not really. Vector images can be enlarged without pixelating, but they don't generally shrink any better than bitmap images. (This is why outline fonts - which are basically collections of vector images - need hinting to look good at small sizes. The vectorness alone isn't enough.)

You may want to open it up in Gimp, switch to black and white mode, and save it. (And hope it doesn't start looking crappy)

I am exporting to .png for print. The image, I am hoping, will be used to create a rubber stamp... so it has to be black and white only. No grey pixles. The company I use has no idea what .svg is, so I have to give them the image in a "normal" graphics format.

When I go to gimp/etc and black and white the image, it basically cuts off everything that was grey and leaves me with a completely unrecognizeable image. I didn't get to play with it yet, but if I switch to gimp and crank up the contrast, maybe I can clean it up first?

Thanks for the help!
Chevee

If it's for print, it would probably be better to export as PDF. Any company that does printing ought to be able to handle PDF.

If some reason you need to use PNG, you will need to export at a large size. 1"x1" doesn't mean much - it's the number of pixels that matters, and it sounds as though your PNG is too small. If it was large enough, then you could threshold it in the GIMP without making a mess of the image.

If you can show us the image we might be able to better advise you.