1. Introduction

Bitmap images can have excellent quality and detail, like the one below:

But this image quality gets reduced if you zoom in. Pixels become visible and the detail is lost. For example, this is the butterfly's head when zoomed up only three times:

There is an alternative type of image, called a vector image, that does not suffer the same loss of quality when rescaled. In this section, we will discuss what vector images are and how they are created, as well as their advantages and disadvantages compared to bitmap images.