A png isn't a vector format, so the important property of the SVG (or EPS, PDF) is lost. A vectorized bitmap is still a bitmap.

What resolution are you looking for in print? If you export your raster at 300 dpi, and enable lossless PNG compression, shouldn't it suffice for most print purposes?

Often, it's not about print. People sometimes take vector images of plots and squeeze a bunch of them on a single page, with the idea that whoever views the paper online can zoom in if they're interested enough.

It still has limited resolution and a much higher storage footprint. Plotting charts is the vector graphics use case par excellence. Having svg support is a no brainer.

Of course you're right that we do need to support SVG and vector formats, but it's also not entirely true that "vector >> raster" in all cases.

Raster does have limited resolution, but so does your screen or most output devices (yes, even scientific plotters).

It's also not necessarily true that it has a higher storage footprint; it depends on the complexity and number of glyphs, the fonts you need to embed for the LaTeX formulae, etc. etc. In large-data cases, raster can be a much more viable visualization transfer medium.

That's true, in practical uses a sufficiently high res raster is indistinguishable from a vector image. Still, it would be nice to have that option.

Working on SVG? What about EPS instead? For scientific publishing EPS is much better unless your visualisation is pretty much an high entropy one.

Please explain why EPS is better.

Most imaging for offset printing is done in PostScript, which can render EPS directly, so there's no format conversion. For web publishing that's not the case, and either is probably fine depending on the workflow.

I've never submitted to a journal that took SVG, nearly everyone I submit to takes EPS.

Reason is quite simple. EPS is based on PostScript. PDF specification contains a subset of PostScript. Embedding EPS into PDF is trivial and yields high quality results. For a printing publication workflow having EPS files at hand saves a lot of time and problems.

SVG is nice too, just needs few more intermediate steps.