XML

Some weeks ago, I wrote about how I modified the SVG image of the MishMash “bubbles”. Today, I got around to doing a similar process with the MishMash “cube”, an illustration summarising how we want to work in MishMash. The cube The idea of the cube is to present the work packages that structure the organisation, the perspectives that are central to all our work, and the approaches which describe the methods used. One of the aims of MishMash is to enable true interdisciplinary collaboration, and the idea is that the cube will assist us with communicating the multidimensionality of such an endeavour. ...

I have previously written about the MishMash emblem and how I cropped it in a text editor. This was based on the fact that an SVG image is a “vector image” in which all elements are described programmatically. So what appears as an image on screen: is, in fact, an XML file with information. Ever since I discovered this, I thought it could be fun to script changes to the SVG. However, when I opened the file to inspect the content, I quickly realised that it wasn’t as easy as that: ...

I have known for a long time that SVG images are vector based, hence the name “Scalable Vector Graphics”. But it only occurred to me today that SVG is an XML-based image format, which means they can be opened and modified as a regular text file. For the MishMash application, we used PDF versions of the figures (which worked well when writing in LaTeX). However, as I am now working on the first web page for MishMash, I discovered that we have SVG versions of the figures. Unfortunately, the files provided by the designers had a lot of white space (or, to be precise, transparency) around the main part of the figure. ...