In LiveArt HTML5 Product Designer, we heavily rely on the SVG format that becomes an industry standard for web applications, including responsive apps for tablets and smartphones. SVG represents a clean vector format, which means it always looks crisp and nice regardless of your resolution, monitor, or device. Whether it’s Retina-based or plain old LCD, the vector would render without any artifacts.
However, in the back office of the decoration industry, there is always state-of-the-art software that requires a specific format the output should be. In some cases, this is 300 dpi PNG or TIFF, in other - EPS or PDF vector formats. Since these may not relate to the web, one needs to be able to produce proper production output out of the LiveArt HTML5 one.
If you are using LiveArt Shop solutions like Magento, Shopify, or WooCommerce, the proper output technology could be already built-in. If you are integrating LiveArt yourself, there are multiple tools you can use to convert the output LiveArt Design SVG into the appropriate format for your production purposes.
Inkscape
Inkscape is a tool that was developed originally for authoring and editing SVG files. Due to its open-source nature, it’s freely distributed and also included as a port for major server platforms, including Ubuntu. By using Inkscape from the command-line, you can convert the vector into EPS or rasterize with given DPI setting into hires PNG.
Pros: all-in-one application, easy to install;
Cons: requires lots of resources, slow on bulk converts;
PhantomJS
PhantomJS is an extension to NodeJS and can be used to accomplish PNG previews of the web pages. By utilizing this feature, one can also prepare screenshots out of the designs produced by users. PhantomJS might be the right choice if you are a NodeJS fan or need quick and straightforward conversion of SVG into PNG formats of various dimensions.
Pros: integrated into NodeJS platform, easy to run;
Cons: no implementations for other platforms, supports raster only;
CloudConvert
This is a new hosted service that also features API to upload and convert images in numerous formats. Among others, it can export SVG into several formats like EPS, PNG, TIFF, and so on.
Pros: no need to install server software, quick and robust;
Cons: requires API development, does not have font embedding option;
ImageMagick
Last but not least, is the choice of millions of developers around the world, the magnificent ImageMagick image library, and the command-line tool. This is an extremely powerful tool that can identify, convert, and edit images using vast options and opportunities. While it focuses on bitmap processing as its main purpose, ImageMagick’s convert command-line tool can be used to produce large bitmap images from SVG. Best results achievable with rsvg delegate, which is installed as a separate application.
Pros: a swiss knife of the image processing, easy to install, already included into number of shared hosting servers, fast;
Cons: no vector to vector conversion support, lower quality compared to other tools;
Regardless of the solution, you would choose, LiveArt team would always be glad to assist and consult on obtaining a production-ready output for your particular integration or project. Check out our practical guide to SVG to get to know more about how to work with this format for a web to print.