5.2.4 Generating Vector Images

If you have a vector imager configured (such as dvisvg or dvisvgm), you can generate a vector version of the requested image as well as a bitmap. The nice thing about vector versions of images is that they can scale infinitely and not loose resolution. The bad thing about them is that they are not as well supported in the real world as bitmaps.

Generating a vector image is just as easy as generating a bitmap image, you simply access the vectorImage property of the node that you want an image of. This will return an plasTeX.Imagers.Image instance that corresponds to the vector image. A bitmap version of the same image can be accessed through the image property of the document node or the bitmap variable of the vector image object.

Everything that was described about generating images in the previous section is also true of vector images with the exception of cropping. plasT_eX does not attempt to crop vector images. The program that converts the L^aT_eX output to a vector image is expected to crop the image down to the image content. plasT_eX uses the information from the bitmap version of the image to determine the proper depth of the vector image.