January Meeting: Dynamic Graphics with SVG

**** NEW DAY, TIME, & LOCATION FOR LAMPSIG MEETING ****

Los Angeles LAMP SIG's January meeting will be on Wednesday, Jan 18
from 7:00 to 9:00 pm at the Tom Bradley Center (home of LULA)
(Address & directions below.)

Main Topic: Dynamic Graphics with SVG - Ted Gould

Graphics and visualization can make your basic text and data compelling for users of all levels. SVG is an XML based vector graphics format specified by the W3C that can be easily used in scripting languages already designed for the web to create interesting, data driven graphics. Ted will cover the basics of the SVG format, and how to create dynamic SVG using PHP among other languages.

Vector Graphics should sound familiar to the artist who has used Adobe Postscript, Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator or Flash. Vector graphics are used by these drawing programs to create images (and text) which can be scaled up or down without losing detail, through the use of Bezier curves.

Programmers will appreciate that since vector graphics are actually defined as mathematical formulas, they are compact and efficient. The obvious application for this is generation of charts and graphs from raw data. The SVG internal format uses XML, which allows DOM access via JavaScript within an SVG document. Via embedded Ecmascript, you can make your SVG images or graphics dynamic and interactive. Ted will be showing examples of SVG's abilities.

Ted Gould is one of the founding developers of the Inkscape project, which is an open source competitor to Adobe Illustrator, that uses SVG as its native file format. Ted and the Inkscape team are working to make Inkscape extensible through plugins and scripts.

Ted is also a member of the GNOME foundation and a Linux PPC user. He prefers vi. Other interests include photography and hiking with his wife and son.