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?
In: Technology
ELI5 explanation of how rasters are lossy:
Take a transparent projector sheet with a grid on it and lay it over a sheet of paper with a line drawn across it. Color in every grid square the line touches with a marker. The squares you filled approximate the line and you can tell roughly what its length and angle are, but you could also draw slightly different lines that would create the exact same grid.
Explaining why vectors are lossless requires perhaps 4th grade math.
Contrast the idea of this grid-filling with slope-intercept form (y = mx + b) Given instructions in this form, you can draw a line on a graph, and no matter how big or small the grid, it’s easy to follow the instructions and end up with the line that was intended. You can guarantee none of the information is lost because the line is generated from the instructions that were provided.
To put it another way:
* A line will produce a specific set of filled in squares on a grid…
* But that set of squares could be described by multiple lines. Not knowing which specific line was intended IS the loss of information.
* A set of instructions like “y = 2x + 3” produces the exact same line every time. This is what vectors are, and because the instructions are preserved and tell you EVERYTHING about the shape, no information can be lost.
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