Cellular Automaton Vector Export

Ideas
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1

This started as a quest to produce a vector SVG export of an ArrayPlot of a cellular automaton. However, it quickly became apparent that this would be more complicated than Export["vectorca.svg",ArrayPlot[CellularAutomaton[30,{{1},0},20]]], because ArrayPlots are actually raster objects, and I wanted little rectangles for each cell. I ended up with this code, which works for any two-dimensional binary array:

Export["~/Documents/jesse.ws/blog/rule30.svg",
MapIndexed[If[#1 == 1, Rectangle[#2 + .25], Nothing] &,
Reverse[Transpose@CellularAutomaton[30, {{1}, 0}, 30], 2], {2}]//Graphics]

Hopefully it might help somebody else in the future!

1 Like
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MapIndexed[If[#1 == 1, Rectangle[#2 + 0.05]] &, Reverse[Transpose@CellularAutomaton[30, {{1}, 0}, 100], 2], {2}] // Graphics

4697re15.png
4697re15.png360Ă—188 2.15 KB

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ArrayPlot[CellularAutomaton[30, {{1}, 0}, 90]]

6019re15.png
6019re15.png360Ă—189 2.55 KB

4

Nothing is a new feature introduced in Mathematica 10.2. I probably should have noted that in my post.

You can change it to Missing[] and add a DeleteMissing.

5

If you examine the SVG outputted by that, you will notice that it isn’t actually vector, but a raster bitmap embedded in the file. This is why I made my code in the first place, as indicated in the second sentence of my original post.

6

MapIndexed[If[#1==1,Rectangle[#2+0.15]]&,Reverse[Transpose@CellularAutomaton[30,{{1},0},90],2],{2}]//Graphics

4617re15.png
4617re15.png403Ă—188 2.05 KB

7

That works as well, although I would argue that it is bad practice to feed Graphics a list containing null values.