The Obscure Origins of the Ghostscript SVG Tiger
Posted by Al Sweigart in misc
That familiar SVG (scalar vector graphics) image of a tiger is the Ghostscript tiger: a vector image that has shipped with the Ghostscript PostScript interpreter for decades. The artwork itself predates its Ghostscript fame. The original tiger.ps / tiger.eps file says it was created in Adobe Illustrator 1.2d4 for OpenWindows 2 on April 12, 1990. The file does not identify the artist, and its exact origin is still unclear. (source)
By 1993, it was included with Ghostscript 2.6.1 as a sample PostScript file. Its detailed Bézier paths, fills, strokes, and colors made it a useful test of PostScript rendering. (ibid) Ghostscript documentation describes it simply as “A dramatic colored picture of a tiger's head,” and the image still appears in Ghostscript examples today. (Ghostscript documentation)
Years of use in demos, screenshots, documentation, and graphics tests made the tiger closely associated with Ghostscript. An SVG conversion uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in 2008 helped spread it further, which is why the tiger now turns up well beyond Ghostscript itself. (Wikimedia Commons)
