Emma Maersk & SVG

Bateaux comparaison

Wikimedia had a nice drawing that showed the relative sizes of some large ships. Unfortunately, their thumbnail is too small to be able to read the text, and the drawing is too big to fit on the screen, so I thought I would try and scale it to a more usable size. Hmmm, it's an SVG file, not one of your normal image formats. How do we scale that? A quick Google search turns up Inkscape, which is the full-blown image editor. Let's give it a shot. Mmm, it's big, takes a while to download. It's big, it takes a while to install. But both operations go by without a glitch, and look, here's our image on the screen. Now, how do we scale it? Poke around on the menu, no luck. Look at the help, massive, look at the index, no luck here either. Post a couple of questions to help and I finally figure out that this is an editing operation for which you need to select what you want to operate on. That would be the entire image. Is "Select All" on the edit menu? It is! Click and drag a couple of times, check the zoom level. That looks like something we can use. Export to a bitmap (not really, it goes to PNG file, but close enough), and presto, chango, here we are, except not quite. Blogger doesn't like big images, so it scales it down. I tried cutting it in half, and posting the two halves, but then we get a gap between the two halves. So I open the image in Paint, select all, copy, go over to Google documents, create a new "document", paste the image from Paint. Now repeat, select all, copy, and finally go over to blogger and paste the image. Geez, what a lot of rig-a-ma-role. But I did it all without having to learn how any of the fancy schmancy applications work. Is it really easier, or quicker?

Update January 2017 replaced missing image.