[Mediawiki-l] Problem Converting SVG Images to thumb with imagemagick

[Rob Church]

On 07/08/07, Schmid, Wolfgang <W.Schmid at t-systems.com> wrote:
> With Sun Servers (Solaris 9) I've a problem to build png thumbnails from
> svg images with imagemagick.
> Some thumbs are ok, some are disordered, in some cases the result is
> only
> a white/transparent picture.

Speaking from personal experience, ImageMagick does quite a poor job
of rasterising SVG images.

> Is it a better solution to compile the newest version from source or
> compile any of the other tools
> like Sodipodi or Inkscape?
> Which tool is used in MediaWiki/Wikipedia?

rsvg (from librsvg), which is quite straightforward to compile,
although there might be packages for Solaris.

http://librsvg.sourceforge.net/

> On
> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Running_MediaWiki_on_Windows#ImageM
> agick
> you can read:
> "PHP now comes with GD enabled by default. This will work for
> thumbnailing,
> and will not require any configuration or modification. Therefore t's
> highly
> recommended to not install ImageMagick, since it is known to be
> unstable."
>
> I think this should be valid for unix too. Is this a joke?

Bear in mind this is talking about using ImageMagick for thumbnailing
bitmap formats, rather than SVG, and also bear in mind that it's on a
page of stuff for Windows. I've never experienced trouble with it, but
it's possible some contributor has had problems using ImageMagick
under Windows in the past.


Rob Church