[Technical] Open Clip Art Library

[Con Zymaris]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 10:10:41PM +1000, Keith Richardson wrote:
> Thank you Con - what programs would one use to work with these?
> Keith
> 

The clipart is mostly in PNG, SVG and WMF formats. 

PNG is a lossless bitmap format which should be usable by all current 
applications that can handle graphics. Use PNG when working with images 
that you intend to do any manipulation on. JPEG is lossy and loses 
integrity very quickly.

WMF is the old-style simple vector format which is used by most/all 
vector-based drawing apps.

SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is the new XML-based more complex/powerful
vector format which is replacing WMF and also competing with Flash for 
animations. Unlike Flash, it's an open standard and usable by all modern 
web browsers. SVG, unlike Flash, is supported by the W3C which manages 
web standards.

 http://www.w3.org/TR/SVG/animate.html

As for apps which can do some/all three and can run on multiple platforms 
(Win, Mac, Linux), try these:

 http://www.inkscape.org/

 http://www.xaraxtreme.org/

 http://www.openoffice.org/

 http://www.gimp.org/

 http://www.abiword.org/

 http://www.scribus.net/ (Desktop publishing, Linux only)

 http://www.koffice.org/ (Office suite, Linux only)

All of these are zero cost and open source. You can install them on every 
computer in your school with no licence hassles.

Cheers,

Con Zymaris

- CEO, Cybersource Pty. Ltd.
- Director, Open Source Industry Australia, Limited.
- Convenor, Open Source Victoria (A Government-funded industry cluster.)
-- 
___________________________________________________________________________
Con Zymaris <conz at cyber.com.au> Level 4, 10 Queen St, Melbourne, Australia 
Cybersource: Australia's Leading Linux and Open Source Solutions Company 
Web: http://www.cyber.com.au/  Phone: 03 9621 2377   Fax: 03 9621 2477