Fundamentals of SVG Programming: Concepts to Source Code (Graphics Series)

Overall System Requirements

The SVG documents in this book have been fully tested with the Adobe SVG viewer (version 3) on a 2 GHz Pentium 4 PC with Windows XP. Roughly 20% of the SVG code was developed on a 166 megahertz PC (and 64 megabytes of RAM) with the same version of the Adobe SVG viewer, and those documents were rendered with reasonable performance times. The minimum system requirements are:

• PC with a minimum Pentium III 500 MHz processor (2GHz is strongly recommended)

• minimum of 64 Mb RAM (128Mb recommended)

• CD-ROM drive

• hard disk with at least 200 Mbytes free space if you want to install the entire contents of the CD-ROM on your machine

• Windows 2000 or later

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher

Launching SVG Documents

The Adobe SVG viewer (version 3) is the recommended SVG viewer. After you have installed an SVG viewer, the SVG documents on the CD-ROM can be viewed in a browser simply by double-clicking on an SVG file. For example, if you want to view the SVG document , first navigate to the folder labeled 'Source Code,' then open the sub-folder 'ch1,' and then double-click on the file .

The primary factor that will affect the rendering time for the SVG documents is the processing power of your machine.

This book focuses on the nuts and bolts of creating graphics images, with performance a secondary consideration. In many cases, the rendering time for the graphics images can be improved, and the book contains suggestions for improving the performance. You will also find images that have a hard-coded width and height of 800 and 500, respectively, which means that some tweaking is required if you want to reduce them in order to incorporate them into HTML pages.