Editing Vector graphics (section)

====To raster====
{{main article|Rasterisation|Raster image processor|Render output unit}}

Modern displays and printers are [[raster graphics|raster]] devices; vector formats have to be converted to a raster format (bitmaps – pixel arrays) before they can be rendered (displayed or printed).{{Sfn|Gharachorloo|Gupta|Sproull|Sutherland|1989|p=355}} The size of the bitmap/raster-format file generated by the conversion 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 much more difficult to go in the opposite direction, especially if subsequent editing of the vector picture is required. It might be an advantage to save an image created from a vector source file as a bitmap/raster format, because different systems have different (and incompatible) vector formats, and some might not support vector graphics at all. However, once a file is converted from the vector format, it is likely to be bigger, and it loses the advantage of scalability without loss of resolution. It will also no longer be possible to edit individual parts of the image as discrete objects. The file size of a vector graphic image depends on the number of graphic elements it contains; it is a list of descriptions.