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Comment by pcwalton | Hacker News Reader

There are many other popular vector graphics formats beyond those mentioned here. Lottie has already displaced SVG for animation/motion graphics, and for static content IconVG exists and is backed by Google. There's also PDF, PostScript, Flash, the glyf format in OpenType, etc.

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IconVG author here. Happy to discuss.

Animation is issue #2 on https://github.com/google/iconvg and I have some ideas but no code yet. I'm also midway through changing the current "version 0" format into a "version 1" format, dropping things like the ArcTo op (inspired by SVG) precisely with one eye on (future) animation support. The ArcTo large-arc-flag, like any boolean-typed value, is impossible to interpolate smoothly.

IMO as long as animation isn't tied to After Effects like Lottie is, you can't go wrong. The fact that the most popular open vector animation format is tied to an expensive, proprietary piece of software that isn't even primarily a vector art package makes me very sad…

Not to mention After Effects is an extremely poorly performing and highly bloated piece of software tied to mountains of spyware… It’s almost impressive how bad the software is by modern standards.

I find After Effects to be one of the most impressive pieces of creative software ever made. An entire industry had been built around it. That said, there is plenty to improve upon.

In no universe could After Effects even be remotely considered bad software.

Franky somebody should do like a TinyDF replacement for pdf... That's also a somewhat bloated format at this point.

Ideally though, the tiny* formats should be forward compatible (?) and interpretable as a valid non-Tiny* document. That would be quite nice for wider adoption (like JSON).

"somewhat bloated" is the understatement of the century. PDF documents can contain executable code in two different programming languages (JavaScript and PostScript), interactive content, digital signatures, their own form of encryption, and more. Why they thought adding JavaScript to an already infamous attack vector of a format is beyond my understanding.

Javascript was added to PDF in order to implement interactive and dynamic forms, including input validation and normalization and dynamically adding/removing form elements based on user interaction. The contents of forms can also be directly submitted to a server. Basically, Adobe didn’t want HTML forms to steal their show, so they implemented the equivalent with PDF. Not saying that was a good idea, but here you go.

PDF can contain executable PostScript? That was new to me. I know the syntax is still PostScript, but without the programming language. Is there a nice description somewhere?

Old versions of PDF allowed to embed arbitrary PostScript for some area of the page, but this was always specified not to have any effect except if the PDF gets converted to PostScript. Especially it was specified to be ignored by PDF viewers and non PostScript printers, making it rather useless. In current PDF versions, this is no longer allowed.

It seems that my understanding of this was not correct. I should have checked this before posting it, but I have a vivid memory of some PDF that rendered a different maze each time you opened it using PostScript and that override everything else. Most of what I'm reading suggests that the turing-complete aspects were removed in the design of PDF.

PDF is indeed a very bloated format, but documents are inherently complex. I don't think you can create anything that deserves the name "tiny" but can still handle anything you might want to send to a printer (and that's a much smaller use case than "anything you want to display on a screen").

What about: DjVu [1]?

It's not very well known, but it's so elegant, and also efficient, especially for scanned files.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu

PDF is bloated because it went beyond documents into 3D models and interactivity.

A compressed, paginated and indexed postscript file is not complex.

PDF/A is a standard with a bunch of features excluded.

As someone who has implemented generating PDF/A documents, I can say it is still a very complicated format, and I would be very happy if it was replaced with something a little more straightforward.

For PDF there are OpenXPS and DjVu.

I have heard very good words about the eps format from a vector-format nerd (he reads file format specifikation books because its fun). I would love to here more opinions about eps from other developers.

How does eps really compare with the other formats mentioned above?

EPS is just PostScript that's designed to be more embeddable. It's a PostScript program that contains some metadata like a preview image (so you can display a thumbnail when embedding it even if you don't have a PS interpreter) and a bounding box (since PS has an arbitrary coordinate system, in order to represent an embedded document without actually interpreting it, you need to know the bounds of what it's going to draw).

The big problem with PS, EPS and Flash as simple graphics formats is that they're all turing complete and you can author documents that will never terminate. When importing EPS, Illustrator used to have a timeout and would fail if the render didn't complete in a couple minutes. I assume it still does, but haven't tried it in years.

I was under the impression that EPS didn't support the full Postscript language - merely the declarative parts. I could be wrong there.

I've been avoiding EPS like the plague for several decades. Unless something has changed since I last looked it would be well below SVG on my preferred format list.

I can't imagine those good words ever came from anyone that has actually used it.

> Lottie has already displaced SVG for animation/motion graphics ...

Looking at the website, it seems like the file format is OSS but the creation side of things is proprietary?

Ongoing thread about Lottie, which also highlights some OSS options for creating Lottie files: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29634114

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