File talk:Seal of California.svg

Improvement

Kudos to the creator, this seal looks fabulous in svg. However, it looks kind of cartoonish and would benefit from having maybe a 1px stroke on all the objects. -- penubag  (talk) 00:40, 30 September 2009 (UTC)

took the liberty of adding a .2px stroke -- penubag  (talk) 05:16, 8 April 2010 (UTC)

Problems with SVG graphics

Some graphic elements are missing entirely and some are wrong. Compare the SVG version to the JPG rendering in the California State Library. The ship in the background is missing. The upper ship at the right foreground should have its sails furled. The beadwork on the inner part of the ring is missing.
Parts of Minerva's lance shaft are missing. I tried to correct it in Inkscape 0.46 on Ubuntu, to no avail. Eye of GNOME 2.24.1 (Image Viewer) in Ubuntu shows the same problem as the Wikipedia raster rendering, and running the XML code for the SVG image through the W3C Validator reports somewhere around 39 serious errors. (I reverted my own upload to the 8 April 2010 version.) There's a note at Wikimedia Commons (Commons:Transition to SVG#Notes) that Inkscape produces invalid SVG files, and that seems to be the case for every version of the Seal of California currently in the database, from the very first upload. As a test, I exported the original SVG to Encapsulated Postscript and opened it in Adobe Illustrator 9, and it looks positively awful. It also revealed what neither Inkscape nor Wikipedia show: There's a shadow half of the lance that doesn't show up at all in the Wikipedia/Wikimedia rendering. Also, there is a complete lack of object grouping, making alignment problematic. Quite a bit of work will be needed to salvage the image. On the other hand, it could just be that the Wikipedia rendering engine for SVG sucks — and that the SVG file format itself sucks due to poor standardization. —Quicksilver^@ 16:41, 5 May 2010 (UTC)

I believe I've figured out part of the problem. Part of the shaft and tip of Minerva's spear are raster (bitmap) graphics. Even though the SVG standard allows embedded raster graphics, the SVG rendering engine in Wikimedia can't handle them, so they don't appear. Examination of the XML code shows numerous instances of additional small PNG blocks, but it's not obvious in Inkscape which ones those are. A patient, step-by-step deconstruction of the image will eventually reveal them and (hopefully) make it possible to replace them with vector elements so that they are displayed correctly.Quicksilver^@ 22:12, 20 May 2010 (UTC)

I sent a quick note to the orginal author, incase he is not watching this image.--Svgalbertian (talk) 02:33, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

All PNG elements have been removed.--Svgalbertian (talk) 20:45, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Legal definition

The legal definition of the Great Seal of the State of California is found in the California Government Code, Sections 399-405. See http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=gov&group=00001-01000&file=399-405. As of 2011, this on-line text version is incomplete: The Great Seal appears in the hard-copy publication of the chaptered bill. See Chapter 134, page 902, Statutes of 1943. To view a picture would require a visit to any law library in California, of which there is at least one in each county seat, or any other well-equipped law library in the United States that has the California Statutes of 1943 in print. Additional color references are provided in Section 420.

The statutes at Sections 405 and 420 specify the colors of various objects on the seal using "Cable color numbers", a system maintained by the Textile Color Card Association of the United States, Inc., New York. It should be possible to convert those numbers to RGB or CMYK values, systems that didn't exist in 1943 when the seal was codified. — Quicksilver^@ 17:37, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Missing Details

There are a few, small details that are still missing from or incorrect on this version of the seal. The ship on the far left should have a smokestack (and a puff of smoke) between the fore and aft masts. There should be a fifth sailing ship headed straight for the viewer, just coming through the gate. On the left side of the gate there should be a building with a small dome (this is discussed in the article). Finally, Minerva's spear should go in front of her right forearm. All of these items can be seen in the 1937 (and current) state seal. I have seen the current Wikipedia version used on everything from coffee mugs to a courthouse in Fresno. It's kind of embarrassing. Blcksx (talk) 20:52, 21 February 2018 (UTC)