How are Vector images “lossless”?

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Like, Vector images are made of separate shapes instead of pixels, but how does it produce an image on a screen if the screen is covered in pixels?

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Most images are bitmaps. Aka, instructions to “put a pixel of x colour here, then a pixel of x colour here”, until the entire image has been built. A map of bits.

You compress this by “allowing” similar coloured pixels to use the same colour, with higher compression leading to a wider definition of “similar”. This causes that “blocky” look in highly compressed images.

Vector images don’t do any of the above. They don’t specify specific pixels at all.

Instead, vector images contain math geometry data telling computers what shape to draw when they see it.

This means vectors can only do relatively simple shapes with limited colours, but means the file size is extremely small and the image can be scaled to any size you like, because the instructions remain the same.

There is no concept of compression in vector graphics, because “draw a 2:1 ration rectangle in the image area” is not compressible.

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