Advantages to this style of drawing over raster graphics:
* Vector-oriented images are more flexible than bit maps because they can be resized and stretched.
* Images stored as vectors look better on devices (monitors and printers) with higher resolutions.
* Bit-mapped images always appear the same regardless of a device's resolution.
* Another advantage of vector graphics is that representations of images often require less memory than bit-mapped images do.
* Zooming in on vector images, the image remains smooth and does not anti-alias
* The parameters of objects can be later modified.
* Moving, scaling, rotating, filling etc. doesn't degrade the quality of a drawing. Moreover, it is usual to specify the dimensions in device-independent units, which results in the best possible rasterization on raster devices.
* From a 3-D perspective, rendering shadows is also much more realistic with vector graphics, as shadows can be abstracted into the rays of light which form them. This allows for photo realistic images and renderings
Almost all sophisticated graphics systems, including CADD systems and animation software, use vector graphics.
In addition, many printers (PostScript printers, for example) use vector graphics. Fonts represented as vectors are called vector fonts, scalable fonts, object-oriented fonts, and outline fonts.
Note most output devices, including dot-matrix printers, laser printers, and display monitors, are raster devices (plotters are the notable exception). This means that all objects, even vector objects, must be translated into bit maps before being output. The difference between vector graphics and raster graphics, therefore, is that vector graphics are not translated into bit maps until the last possible moment, after all sizes and resolutions have been specified.
PostScript printers, for example, have a raster image processor (RIP) that performs the translation within the printer. In their vector form, therefore, graphics representations can potentially be output on any device, with any resolution, and at any size.
Computer displays are made up from small dots called pixels. The picture is built up from these dots. The smaller and closer the dots are together, the better the quality of the image but the bigger the file needed to store the data.
If the image is magnified it becomes grainy as the resolution of the eye enables it to pick out individual pixels.
Vector graphics files store the lines, shapes and colours that make up an image as mathematical formulae. Since these formulae can produce an image scalable to any size and detail the quality of the image is only determined by the resolution of the display. The file size of vector data generating the image stays the same.
Printing the image to paper will usually give a sharper, higher resolution output than printing it to the screen but can use exactly the same vector data file.
The size of the file generated will depend on the resolution required but the size of the vector file generating the bitmap/raster file will always remain the same.
Thus it is easy to convert from a vector file to a range of bitmap/raster file formats but it is very much more difficult to go in the opposite direction. However, once the file is converted from the vector format it is likely to be bigger and it loses the advantages of scalability without losing resolution.
Editing will also lose the convenience of being able to work on individual parts of the picture as discrete objects.
Vector formats are not always appropriate in graphics work. For example, digital devices such as cameras and scanners produce raster graphics that are impractical to convert into vectors.
Some vector editors support animation, while others (e.g. Adobe Flash) are specifically geared towards producing animated graphics. Generally, vector graphics are more suitable for animation, though there are raster-based animation tools as well.
Vector editors are closely related to desktop publishing software such as Adobe InDesign or Scribus, which also usually include some vector drawing tools (usually less powerful than those in standalone vector editors). Modern vector editors are capable of, and often preferable for, designing unique documents (like flyers or brochures) of up to a few pages; it's only for longer or more standardized documents that the page layout programs are more suitable.
3D computer graphics software such as Maya or Blender can also be thought of as an extension of the traditional 2D vector editors, and they share some common concepts and tools.