File:Euro-Construction.svg

A complete construction of the Euro symbol using vector graphics.

Construction notes

This construction also display the European colors (Blue and Gold) for the symbol.

Note that this version aligns the points C and C’ with the radius lines starting from center O, and pointing to the opening mouth D-D’ of the symbol.

This is possible only if the opening angle of 40° from horizontal is reduced a little to about 37° (or more precisely, the angle whose tangeant is exactly equal to 0.75; in that case, the construction is much easier and the height of the open mouth is also exactly equal to the half of the total height of the symbol, and the left half of the outer circle is divided exactly into three equal vertical bands.)

This small difference is nearly invisible, and this perfection of alignments adds interesting visual effects (with the default angle of 40°, the horizontal strokes seem to be too much advanced to the right). This is also useful because it allows placing all the important control points on a regular 36×36 grid, and then to finish the complete symbol using only a simple compass (only for drawing the arcs of circles basedon this grid points) and a straight rule, without having to find an approximation for the 40° angle.

Implementation notes

Unlike other SVG implementations, it was built manually by using formulas and not using a SVG editor; this gives perfect dimensions according to the definition, and a very small filesize because all styles are compressed and the coordinates of all control points become exact integers when using the proper scale in the definition.

Note: the start and end arrow markers still do not appear correctly with the current SVG-to-PNG renderer on Wikipedia because it still does not support or scales correctly the standard "<marker>" definition feature; instead, it just draws some tiny pixel instead of using the user-defined markers specified by the CSS style="marker-start:url(#id)" or style="marker-end:url(#id)" for path drawing primitives. There's no problem with W3C-compliant renderers (for example in Adobe SVG Viewer) or in common SVG editors, like Sodipodi or Inkscape).

Own work, initially made for Wikipedia.

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