Let's investigate possibility to make improvements to SVG output format created by IGB.

At the GCC2014, I talked with Ravi Alla (ravi.alla@berkeley.edu) from UC Berkeley who has edited many SVG (vector graphics) images created using the IGB export image feature. See publications from Brad Cairns lab; everyone in the lab uses IGB to create and then edit genome snapshots.

He suggested some ways to improve the SVG images that IGB makes and showed me some examples.

Understanding how IGB snapshots translate into SVG can give us some insight into optimizations for Genoviz SDK drawing code.

Example use cases/tasks:

Make and SVG file in IGB and try to edit it as follows using Adobe Illustrator, the SVG graphics editor used by many scientists.

• try to remove a track; note the track has many rectangles and elements that have to be deleted. Often when making a figure, a scientist wants to remove elements that are not necessary.
• take note: sometimes tracks/rectangles extend beyond the edges of the image
• try to change colors of all the exons in gene model; note that when zoomed out and all the exons of a gene model look like one box, they are actually many individual boxes in the SVG image.
• try to edit text; it's not possible at least for the coordinate axis. sometimes journals specific the font in figures and users have to change it themselves. (Natural Structural Biology, PLoS)
• sometimes users need to edit or remove tic marks from the coordinates axis. this takes a lot of effort

Try making an SVG image from a large chromosomal region with several graphs loaded. Note that the SVG image can be very big and takes a long time to open in Illustrator.

Problem is: it's a fair bit of effort to edit the SVG image and get it to be publication quality.