I´m new to Raphael and would like to do some basic questions on how to architect my app:
I need to draw models on a visual graphical editor and save them to files (I call them screens). At runtime, I need to load these screens and animate them from server data using Ajax.
Using SVG I can load data using this simple command:
<object id="svgobject" type="image/svg+xml" data=".\svg\svgfilename.svg"></object>
Also, on SVG, we can use some graphical visual editors and that´s all we need to built the screens. The rest if javascript code to get element ids and change their attributes at runtime based on ajax call to get server data.
As SVG is not supported on old browser, one natural choice is to go for Raphael, but I don´t know if there is visual graphic editor that support Raphael scripting language and how to save/load these scripts at runtime.
So, What would be the best approach to visual edit my models, save them to a file and load at realtime using Raphael ?
Ian's answer is one solution. The other way of doing this is to convert SVG documents to a data structure that Raphael can understand.
For relatively simple SVG images you can use svg2path. It converts SVG files (or svg from a URL) to paths that can be loaded into Raphael. From the documentation, running the following on the command line:
svg2path some.svg
generates a path file called some.path that can be loaded in Raphael (presumably using the paper.path() method).
It's available on github and npm.
You could use a plugin like https://github.com/wout/raphael-svg-import or https://github.com/jspies/raphael.serialize https://github.com/crccheck/raphael-svg-import-classic to get you started maybe. I think you may need to do some extra work to cope with groups and Raphael.
Edit to clarify, I'm not sure from your other comments what you mean by Raphael Mode from a graphic editor. You can just the graphic as a straight SVG and import. I'm not sure why there needs to support Raphael scripting.
The VectorEditorJS is a nice starting point for you.Look into editor.js to build or rebuild your own functionality over it.Here's a demo.
EDIT
The SVGEdit demo has got code to save the vector as an svg.You can look into the code.
Related
I have a system build in PHP where I take a pdf and place it as a background and then on a second layer place text on top of it with coordinates. This makes that managing the two different parts are easy. Because the initial pdf is difficult to reproduce in html. So html2pdf is not an option. I tried it but because of all the different lines and sections and text the library cannot manage it.
Base PDF example
Because of reasons I am now looking to replicate this functionality in javascript. So I was wondering if something similar is possible in jsPDF. Or any other library.
After a long and tedious search I found that PDF-LIB is what I needed. They allow to pull in a existing pdf and alter it by writing ontop of it.
I did experience some issues with pulling in the pdf but that can be solved. It was mostly because of fetch() method. But they allow Base64 inport.
This is my first time working with SVG files and I wasn't able to google the answer for this question. I have a .svg illustration created from Adobe Illustrator. I want to load this image into a web page and be able to manipulate it with javascript. Is there a javascript library that allows me to do this? The library has to work on current mobile devices. Fantasy code that illustrates what I'm trying to do:
<img src="pic.svg" id="pic"/>
$('#pic').rotate('90')
$('#pic').scale('200%')
$('#pic').move(x, y)
I know you can manipulate DOM elements like this using javascript, but will the svg image be scaled without distortion? Also, I think SVG has other fancy transformations that javascript doesn't normally support. Ideally, I'd want to use those too.
If you incorporate your SVG graphics with <img>, you'll be able to do exactly the same stuff as with any other image format - no more and no less. (The only benefit might be that you can change width/height without losing crispness.)
If you want to transform or otherwise change any elements of the SVG itself, it's a good idea to make the SVG inline. Maybe this answer helps. If your SVG was generated by Illustrator, cleaning the SVG might drastically decrease the file size and make it more friendly for JavaScript manipulation.
If you stick with <img>, you can still use CSS3 transforms (see the specs for an exhaustive description).
What cross-browser JavaScript SVG library will allow me to display and interact with pre-made SVG images.
I know of these libraries:
Raphaël: I'm currently using this along with a SVG loading plugin. But that plugin does not support Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator SVGs (i.e. most SVGs).
cang: This library looks promising, but it requires <canvas> support, which IE doesn't have natively.
svgweb: Another more-promising library. It requires Flash, but most IE users have Flash.
jQuery SVG: It seems to be able to load SVG images, but development seems to have died. And it requires me to use a modified version of jQuery 1.3.
I'm basically trying to make chunks of arbitrary images "selectable".
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Raphaël does support importing of Illustrator SVGs, through the use of this great plugin. All you have to do is save your ai file as an SVG, open it up using a text editor, copy out the code and import it with the plugin. Works great, except : only supports "path" objects, no text, no gradients, no shadows...
I'm using http://excanvas.sourceforge.net/ for Canvas support in IE and Cang for SVG suport using Canvas.
What you could do is use a combo of cang and svgweb, you could check to see if the browser allows canvases, and if so, load cang and use it. Otherwise check if they have flash, and if so, use svgweb. If they have neither, then tell them to upgrade their browser.
You could read http://ejohn.org/blog/future-proofing-javascript-libraries/ if you are unsure about javascript feature detection.
I'd be tempted to make use of Google Chrome Frame (an IE plug-in). This will save you maintaining two sets of code (one for IE users, another for regular browser users). Adding the following meta-tag to your page will enable SVG to render in IE (via GCF):
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
See here for instructions how to detect, and potentially prompt the user to install GCF.
The best solution I've found is to use Raphael along with this tool, which allows you to convert SVG files (generated by Illustrator, in my case) to Raphael code almost as-is. And since Raphael is IE6+ - you could easily be crossbrowsy with some effort on your part.
Here is my example of what can be achieved with a combination of these two things.
I'm trying to render these files http://registro.soveci.com/dom_izq.svg and http://registro.soveci.com/dom_der.svg with RaphaelJS and raphael-svg-import, but somehow a path appears misplaced on the screen. If you view it with a standard compliant browser, you can see the path being rendered right, so it must be a problem with raphael-svg-import.
Can you provide me some hints??? (I'm new to SVG)
I have been experimenting with SVG for a little bit now and it's a bit of a coincidence because I just finished playing with that plugin today.
The url to a demo I have there also contains zip files in the documentation so you could experiment with these in Inkscape or any SVG editor and see if you cannot configure them to something in your project.
For what ever reason this plugin "likes" some SVG's but not others so maybe you could adapt one of the SVGs in the zip and it will probably work.
The authors know the plugin does not always work but it is gradually improving and even now I think it's possible to write compatible SVG's if you tinker with them.
If you need a facility to convert certain SVG's just to javascript you could use this.
I'm trying to play around with the silhouette of fonts in Javascript, but I can't go forward without being able to get the vectors from the characters. Is there any way to retrieve this information and use it? Any examples of this being done?
Paper.JS seems like it could be pretty handy but I haven't found any font examples.
There is no direct way to retrieve shapes from characters in JavaScript. I suspect that is because font rendering is not done directly by the browser. This task is usually delegated to a third party library like cario.
You could create the text in an SVG editor such as Inkscape, convert the text to paths (Path → Object to Path) and manipulate them via JavaScript.
Using SVG Fonts also seems like a way to go. This is basically an SVG file that saves the shapes of all characters. You could load this as XML into a HTML/JavaScript setup and process the character shapes from there. Font Squirrel has a generator for making #font-face kits. It also includes an SVG version of the font in the archive.