SVG Pottery: pottery drawings on the Web

SVG Pottery is a set of best practices, how-tos and recommendations to ease the process of publishing pottery drawings on the Web.

In short we strongly recommend that:

  1. you publish your drawings on the Web, and not just on paper, not just inside a PDF article, but on their own
  2. you use SVG as the format for publishing your drawings

The rest of this documentation goes into the details of why and how, and explores some issues and possibilities with this model. You can just go ahead and start using SVG if you like.

Some software tools are also being developed to assist archaeologists with simple, quick ways to publish their drawings on the Web.

This documentation is maintained in a Git repository at Codeberg.

If you want to cite this guide in your academic work, you can refer to the following paper, that was presented at the Computer Applications in Archaeology conference in 2012 [COSTA2014]:

[COSTA2014]Costa, Stefano. 2014. «SVG Pottery: Upgrading Pottery Publications to the Web Age». In Archaeology in the Digital Era: Papers from the 40th Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA), Southampton, 26-29 March 2012, edited by Philip Verhagen, 533–40. Amsterdam University Press. http://dare.uva.nl/aup/en/record/500958

The SVG version described here is SVG 1.1, the current W3C recommendation.

Contents:

Indices and tables