The newest version of Geocortex Printing and Geocortex Reporting includes the ability to use SVG images in both your print templates and reports.
Using an SVG (scalable vector graphic) in your reports or print templates reaps many benefits, such the ability to scale when you zoom into the image, they are highly configurable and they are smaller than PNGs, so you’ll be able to see a performance boost in your reports and print templates.
With that in mind, watch Paul demonstrate how using SVG images in Geocortex Printing and Geocortex Reporting allows you to maintain high-quality images while zooming into your print templates and reports.
Video Transcript
“Hi, it’s Paul Van Haaren, I’m the Technical Sales Manager here at Geocortex. Today, we are going to have quick look at a new feature that has been added to both Geocortex Printing and Geocortex Reporting and that’s the ability to use SVG images in both your print templates and your reports. Let’s have a look!
So, here we are withn Geocortex Reporting Designer and I think before we jump into the configuration here, I think it may be good to define what an SVG is, and compare it to some of the other image file types that are out there.
Commonly, you might see image file types such as PNG or JPEG, and those are raster images and what that means is they’re basically made up of a fixed number of pixels that form a complete image. What that also means is that as you zoom into this image, those pixels aren’t changing those like I said, they’re a fixed number. So, as you zoom in, you start to see those pixels appear and you start to see jagged edges and things like that.
SVG on the other hand, which stands for scalable vector graphics, is a vector image and what that means is, I won’t go into the math behind it, but basically what that means is vector images are scalable, you’re able to zoom into that image and it will scale and continue to show those soft lines or hard lines.
SVGs are great – it keeps that resolution as I said. They’re smaller, so they’re not as large as PNGs and JPEGs. So, you might see a performance boost if you add this type of image into your reports and print templates. They’re also highly configurable, so you’re able to kind of jump into the code of the image itself and to do so all sorts of CSS styling and different configurations there. So, really flexible that way too. It’s a really useful image file type and highly recommend it when you’re putting your reports and print templates together.
I’m just going to show you an example here, where you can see the difference between a PNG image and an SVG image.
This image I have right here is a PNG, so I’m going to go ahead and run a print preview and I’ll show you what I mean about the scaling here.
So, I was going to put it just an example feature ID here, and here we are we can see that the report has generated here and as we zoom in you can really see that the pixilation happening on our PNG here. You can see the rest of the document is fine, but we really see in that that PNG image those pixels start to appear.
If I bounce back into my Geocortex Reporting application here, I can change that image to an SVG and I have one prepared here, simply changes it there.
Let’s run that that report again.
Ok and here we are we can see that now that we’ve got a report generated again, and as I zoom in yeah soft lines all the way or hard lines whatever we want to describe it. You can see that the quality of that image has not degraded as I zoom in. This is a really nice look to your report, and keeps that quality up as you zoom into it.
The same idea over in Printing I can do the same thing, select my SVG and go ahead and do a print here.
Here we are, and we’ve got our print template generated and again as I zoom in we’ve got that quality maintained all the way in, so really super handy. We highly recommend using SVG images when you’re adding imagery into your Geocortex reports and print templates.
Hopefully, you’ve learned something today and have yourself a great day. Cheers!”
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