File talk:ASCII train station.PNG

ShouldBeSVG template

This image should not (or at least need not) be converted to SVG format. In my opinion, it is fundamentally a bitmap — it contains information that could only be lost by turning it into SVG. For example, an SVG version might use a browser-specific font to render the text, which would mess up the ASCII art (if the chosen font were proportional) or merely change its appearance for no good reason (if it were fixed-width but not identical to Courier).

Therefore, any SVG version of this image would have to do one of two things:

1. Embed the Courier font, or some similar fixed-width font, in the image file. The practical problem with this idea is that fonts are big. This slightly-lossy SVG version would wind up being bigger than the lossless PNG version it aimed to replace!

1. Forget about converting the text, and just include a bitmap of the whole image in the SVG version. But PNG is the right format for bitmaps; it doesn't make sense to embed a bitmap in SVG if PNG is available.

Therefore, I've taken the {{ShouldBeSVG}} tag off the image page again. --Quuxplusone 03:35, 7 May 2007 (UTC)