Wikipedia:Featured picture candidates/File:Ornamental Alphabet - 16th Century.svg

Initial[edit]

Reason: One of the best vectorisations out there, and a wonderful example of decorated initials
Articles this image appears in: Initial
Creator: Vectorised by User:JovanCormac

Support as nominator --Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 20:10, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Amazing vectorization, highly encyclopedic. Durova²⁸⁵ 21:14, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support Great image, and interesting. Never knew that's what those large opening letters were called. Staxringold _talk^contribs 21:42, 26 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Question Why are certain letters omitted? According to Latin alphabet, the Archaic Latin alphabet has 21 letters, but not this 21. The classical latin alphabet has 23 and of course the modern alphabet has 26. The only reason that I can come up with is that 26 is semiprime so you can only go into a 2*13 or 13*2 table to have no gaps which is ugly... Noodle snacks (talk) 06:49, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I presume that, in the book this was collected from, some letters, by chance, just never appeared. If you want a coherent set of samples of 16th-century initials, you probably have to take what you get. Shoemaker's Holiday (talk) 09:51, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
~~Oppose~~ for now. The borders of each letter need some cleanup. I really hope this wasn't an inappropriate trace, but since this is an SVG, it can easily be fixed. I'm going to try to upload a newer version with some cleanup of unneeded elements... Zoo Fari 16:46, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
~~Support alt~~ I went through it and improved borders. It also had a slight decrease in file size. It was actually pretty good; the vectorizer did a great job. Zoo Fari 23:26, 27 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- I think you opened a can of worms... which might not be a bad thing. Are the marks in upper right corner of G wear or intentional? How come the inner and outer box of G aren't equally far apart all around? Should the right edge inside the box of P be straightened? In many of the boxes the white lines between boxes are different on top or sides verses the bottom. I don't really know the answer. I agree the original boxes were not very good. But I think your perfectly even sized boxes tend to clash with the images and make some imperfections more apparent. I tend to think maybe something in between would be best? Or maybe some alignment work. I'm not fully sure. (But, really great job on this vectorization otherwise). gren グレン 05:06, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - Yes, it definitely has alignment issues, but I was not able to fix all of it. First, they aren't broken into parts and the file size is awfully big—too big and caused my system to work slow. I was going to oppose for that, but I didn't want to be picky. It took me more than five hours just to add new borders, something that could have been done under 30 minutes. I say suspend this until the file size is reduced and fixed. Zoo Fari 05:47, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
I did a thorough restoration of the image and replaced the original upload with it. I cleaned up all the borders as suggested by ZooFari (without compromising the interior, though) and fixed all the tears, cuts and holes in the image - thankfully, I found a second scan of the same page at [1], which allowed me to distinguish between intentional details and damages. As a final step, I split the image into single letters and realigned everything along a neat grid for a clean, even appearance. You can find all those changes in the "Original" image nominated here. I strongly encourage everyone to compare it with the previous version (Old vs. New). I hope you like it as much as I do. -- JovanCormac (talk) 09:39, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support. Restored original. -- JovanCormac (talk) 09:57, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Support since it is in initial rather than trying to directly illustrate the letters or something. Noodle snacks (talk) 10:31, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Neutral I've struck out my votes. I just can't make up my mind. I appreciate Jovan's good restoration, but it wasn't what I was expecting. The file is still filled with too many unnecessary "nodes" and Jovan's borders aren't object elements, but paths instead—also made up of multiple nodes that aren't needed. My alt is not perfect either: the alignment is off and the interior borders do not align with the exterior borders. Despite the enormous size, I suppose I prefer the original. Zoo Fari 18:01, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- The reason why the borders in my restoration are paths, and have many more nodes than one might expect, is that they are deliberately not perfectly rectangular towards the interior. At first I simply used rectangular frames like you did but I found that their look just doesn't match the "hand-carved" one of the letters, and one could tell that they were added digitally. So I merged the existing borders with the rectangular frames and did a bit of voodoo and a lot of tiny adjustments until I was satisfied that the outcome looked natural. As for the file size, it is a little over 1 MB which is hardly big for a Commons picture; most high-quality photos have 3-5 times that file size. The only "size" issue that remains IMO is the fact that the SVG is so complex that users with low-end systems probably cannot edit it. But making the frames rectangular would not change that one bit, as most of this complexity comes from the actual letter illustrations. -- JovanCormac (talk) 18:35, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  - The rectangles look perfect to me and IMO the object would have been just as good as paths. That's not really my concern anyways, and I'll support the original despite all the issues. Zoo Fari 19:35, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
    - Thank you, I really appreciate your feedback and your inspiration for restoring the borders. -- JovanCormac (talk) 20:21, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Promoted File:Ornamental Alphabet - 16th Century.svg --wadester 16 03:33, 5 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]