[kepler-dev] Re: illustrator svg settings

[Edward A. Lee]

Matt:

I agree that this would be a very nice solution, but it could be tricky
to implement.  In theory, one can use SwingWrapper in Diva to wrap an
an object.  Unfortunately, everyone who has tried to do so has run up
against problems and has then given up...  I haven't tried myself,
so I'm hesitant to try to finger the blame... The Diva architecture
is by no means simple...

I've cc'd John Reekie, author of Diva, in case he has suggestions
or comments.

One advantage of the approach we are using with the icon editor
is that you can fairly easily animate icons.  Since the elements
of an icon are parameters with parameters giving the color, size,
etc., the visuals can easily be made a function of parameters in
the model.

Edward


At 12:03 PM 3/8/2005 -0900, Matt Jones wrote:
>Thanks for the update, Edward.  It suprises me a little that you are 
>moving towards raster formats given that the ptolemy canvas needs to 
>support such extensive rescaling operations while zooming.  I thought SVG 
>was a nice solution to that, and we were planning on using it for all of 
>our new icons.
>
>The problem, of course, is that Ptolemy doesn't support some of the basic 
>SVG constructs such as group elements and path elements, among others, so 
>creating the SVG icons from standard apps is hard. So I've been 
>investigating what it would take to get the Batik SVG renderer installed 
>in Ptolemy for more complete SVG support.
>
>Batik provides a Swing component 
>(org.apache.batik.swing.svg.JSVGComponent) that can render SVG that looks 
>very easy to use -- just create the component and pass it the SVG DOM (see 
>links below).  However, its not clear how Swing components fit into the 
>Diva framework.  Does the diva.canvas.toolbox.SwingWrapper class work (it 
>doesn't seem to be referenced from any of our code)?  If so that might be 
>a fairly simple way to handle it.  I've looked at the existing XMlIcon and 
>SVGIcon classes and they seem harder to adapt because they are so closely 
>tied into the Diva Figure framework using PaintedObject (which Diva docs 
>say is deprecated anyways).
>
>What do you think?  Would SwingWrapper work?  If so, we might spend a bit 
>of time getting it implemented.  Your recommendations are appreciated. Thanks,
>
>Matt
>
>Links
>------
>JSVGComponent API:
>http://xml.apache.org/batik/javadoc/org/apache/batik/swing/svg/JSVGComponent.html
>
>Batik JSVGCanvas tutorial:
>http://xml.apache.org/batik/svgcanvas.html
>
>
>Edward A. Lee wrote:
>>Note that we've been moving away from SVG for representing icons...
>>I'm not sure that's what you are doing... The SVG supported for this
>>is extremely limited, and it would be a fair amount of work to
>>make it more complete.  We now use the icon editor instead, which
>>supports basic graphic elements as attributes, and also supports
>>gifs or jpeg images.
>>Edward
>>At 11:44 AM 3/7/2005 -0900, Matt Jones wrote:
>>
>>>Thanks, Laura.  This composite looks great.  The icons are all solid
>>>colors and simple lines, so they should be able to be represented in the
>>>simplified SVG that ptolemy supports.  Getting them into that format
>>>might not be easy, however.  Illustrator, for example, makes extensive
>>>use of SVG 'path' elements and group ('g') elements when writing out
>>>SVG, which ptolemy doesn't support.  But we can get the developers to
>>>get that stuff fixed, probably at a minimum creating a conversion
>>>script.  It looks to me like we should be able to use the same SVG for
>>>the canvas and the tree because they should scale ok.  I'm moving this
>>>conversation onto the list so that the other Kepler developers are aware
>>>of the issues.
>>>
>>>Matt
>
>--
>-------------------------------------------------------------------
>Matt Jones                                     jones at nceas.ucsb.edu
>http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/    Fax: 425-920-2439    Ph: 907-789-0496
>National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS)
>University of California Santa Barbara
>Interested in ecological informatics? http://www.ecoinformatics.org
>-------------------------------------------------------------------

------------
Edward A. Lee
Professor, Chair of the EE Division, Associate Chair of EECS
231 Cory Hall, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720
phone: 510-642-0253 or 510-642-0455, fax: 510-642-2845
eal at eecs.Berkeley.EDU, http://ptolemy.eecs.berkeley.edu/~eal