Best SVG image size for SCADA mimic

IGX equipped with a wonderful feature that auto fit any image with various sizes or resolutions into any screen/monitor during runtime. This gets rid of the painful trouble that traditional SCADA had to redraw the mimic when different sizes of monitor or resolutions are being applied at site. Since you already have such luxury, why do you bother about setting the width and height of a scalable image? let alone the required ratio? The short answer is to make yourself convenient in many aspects especially come to dealing with outside world that don’t have scalable freedom that you enjoyed with Inkscape SAGE.

The longer answers are listed below:

  1. Although SVG format is getting greater support in recent years, but you will bump into many situations that need to export your work into *.png raster format.
  2. The default readable font size is 10~12 pt. Making your image extremely big or small will require you to adjust the font size.
  3. You will be relieved when you occasionally have to get your artwork printed.
  4. When you need to output your images for video production, the two very popular HD resolutions of 16:9 ratio are 720p & 1080p which having the resolutions of 1280×720 & 1920×1080 respectively.
  5. Our SVG symbol library for industrial automation that you can use for your SCADA mimic is customized to easily fit into A4/Letter size for above many reasons.

Since exporting to PNG format is essential in this topic, you will be interested to know that setting 90 as DPI will give you the same output resolution as per the drawing document, and setting to 180 DPI will double the output size, and conversely for 45 DPI will halve the size. In another word, it’s for your output scaling purpose here. Another thing to observe is to ensure you click on the Page before clicking export. Last tips is you can do Batch Export when you have multiple selections within one drawing.

So the conclusion is best go for HD 1080p or 720p or WVGA (854×480), in any case that you are making simpler image, then reduce to a size that based on same ratio, e.g. 640×360, so that you can easily export into 720p/1080p whenever needed. Although the goal is to make yourself convenient, but the above mentioned sizes are not found in the default Inkscape document sizes! So when you are sure that you are unlikely to export for above purposes, go for Letter/A4 horizontal that closest to HD sizes.

p/s: Remember to get your raster imaged compressed with Right Click context menu.