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
There are, basically, two kinds of images – bitmaps and vectors.
Bitmaps are, as the name implies, maps of bits. They’re also sometimes called rasters. They’re instructions that describe each pixel, line by line. If you have a 100×100 picture, it will contain instructions on what each of the 10.000 pixels should look like.
A vector image is math. Instead of containing information on the individual pixels, it contains instructions on how to draw it. In more human terms, it might say “there’s a black line that starts at coordinates 20,40 and ends at 40,40.”
This means they can be scaled infinitely. If you make a bitmap bigger, you simply take the individual squares and expand them. There’s no way to know what’s in-between – but a drawing instruction can be made as little or as big as you want.
The previous line may have been from a 100×100 size originally, but if you need to upscale it to 1000×1000, your computer can just multiply each coordinate by 10, and you’ll get the same picture.
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