What Image Format Should I Use?

[davmeyer]

Greetings.  I'm just starting down the structured authoring path.  My prior DTP environment was InDesign/Quark + EPS = PDF.   What we'd like to do now is XML (with ??? images) = PDF & HTML. 

Our documents are very simple, with very simple black/white vector line art.  In a perfect world, I'd like one file that could serve as the editable (via Adobe Illustrator) source file, an image file that would work for rendering PDFs, and that would work as an image in rendered HTML.

Is there one format that accomplishes this?  If so, what am I sacrificing?

Or, am I condemed to maintaining mutiple files of every illustration?

Thanks!  davmeyer

[dcramer]

We use svgs as our source. When going to pdf these are consumed directly by XEP. For html, we have Apache Batik convert the svg to png. The .svg version is the only one we store in our repository. It serves as the source we edit in Illustrator or Inkscape. Sometimes Visio svgs even work but Visio svgs can be buggy and opening a Visio svg in Visio isn't safe. You should always save a .vsd version of the file.

In XMetaL, we have scripts that notice when the image's file name ends with .svg. When it does, the script checks for a (temporary) png version of the file. If that exists, it displays it. If the temp png version does not exist, it asks you if you want to rasterize it. Click ok and it creates a png for you. There's a contextual menu item for rerasterizing an image too. When you build a doc, it compares the age of the png with the svg and rerasterizes if necessary. I don't yet have XMetaL check the age of the files.

It works ok, but I still dream of a day when XMetaL displays svgs natively. I heard IE 9 might. If that happens, maybe it'll make it easier for them to add to XMetaL.

David