Linja Lili is a tiny web app to draw things. It’s very particular kind of program, though. I want to use it instead of Inkscape for map icons. The trouble with Inkscape is that it is a program to create great vector graphics with all the SVG bells and whistles, and it generates big SVG files full of extra information that Inkscape needs... and all of that is unnecessary bloat when looking at it from a map icon perspective.
A map icon, as far as I am concerned, is just a bunch of lines and polygons. Ideally, represented as a single path element in SVG. I always wanted a tool to strip an SVG document back to basics instead of writing SVG by hand in a text editor, like an animal. Which is what I’ve been doing.
Or indeed, after seeing dotgrid, I thought that maybe I could write a super simple tiny web app to create SVG files. That’s what Linja Lili is. Don’t forget to read the Linja Lili Help page.
References
Path elements in SVG are elements using commands such as “move to”, “line to”, “rectangle”, “arc”, and “quadratic Bézier curve” to create shapes.
Here’s a thread by @zens on Mastodon talking about the drawing primitives used in Postscript, how it was used as the basis for the NeXT operating system and the NeWS unix system, how it got renamed to Quartz for Mac OSX, which got a canvas tag, which made its way into HTML5, but also how it ended up in SVG.
A postscript library is called a prologue…
#Maps #Linja Lili
@nasser@merveilles.town made svg-editor.
@neauoire@merveilles.town made dotgrid and ronin.