Posted November 03, 2023 by notpeter
#playdate #playpaint #macpaint
Back in March, I posted on Mastadon about my efforts to create pixel perfect SVGs by hand. This was prompted by social platforms being really bad at handling small images like the 400x240 Playdate screenshots. Unlike most images, where dithering, gradients and blur can improve perceptual image quality, for pixel perfect 1bit low-res images they look terrible without sharp edges at pixel boundaries.
So I decided to see if I could coerce a vector format, SVG, into perfect little pixels that scaled. If you enable the `crispEdges` value for shape-rendering you can draw single pixels in SVG and make them show up as perfect little boxes.
I then worked out the movements for a 5x5 smiley face:
Which renders as the following:
Anyways. Now you when you save a file in addition to a gif and playdate PDI formats, you also get an SVG. The size is not unreasonable (e.g. 25KB) but there is definitely room for improvement.
In v0.5.0 I also fixed a bug where it was possible to accidentally draw outside the boundaries of the image canvas. Ooops.