I want to create a drawing application where I can place text and images on a canvas. Those elements also need to be interactively manipulated. Eventually the resulting canvas has to be exported to a vector based PDF. An excellent contender for this functionality would be SVG.
However, this application also needs to be crossbrowser compatible. I've been browsing around for some time now and have seen a couple of solutions available. I found among others RaphaelJS and Google's SVGWeb for working with SVG.
Now for converting those SVG files to a PDF I'm not sure if for instance Batik will offer me what I am looking for.
Also, how would bitmap images be handled when converting the SVG to PDF?
Images within a PDF have to be part of the PDF. They can use any number of compression techniques (jpeg, fax, jbig2, zip, gif, a couple others), various bits per color, various colors per pixel, and so forth... but the pixels must be defined within that PDF.
I've used Batik myself. A little clunky in combination with iText (surprisingly large amount of code involved), but quite serviceable. The only thing that really bugged me was that it wouldn't draw text as text... Batik insists on drawing it as paths. They may have overcome this since I started using it a year or two ago. But that was kind of a deal breaker (HUGE pdf bloat) so we ended up rendering our text separately: PITA, potential z-order issues (that never came up for us), plus a couple subtle interal layout issues that didn't turn up till later.
Batik supports script, animation, and a variety of Other Things that don't really matter within the bounds of SVG->PDF conversion. There's at least one other Java SVG library out there that is much more compact(not as feature rich... half empty/half full), though I can't for the life of me remember the name at the moment. The name came up on the iText mailing list maybe a year ago? Don't recall exactly. Quite some time ago, and AFTER I got Batik working. Ah well.
Batik can convert svg to pdf, Inkscape or Adobe Illustrator can too AFAIK.
I think that Inkscape would be your best choice here, it mostly sticks to SVG 1.1 for the shapes it implements (using a few of its own properties, which you can get rid of if you save it as a plain SVG). For me, even when I save as an Inkscape SVG, it displays fine in browsers even with blurs, though it won't work in Internet Explorer. For that, there is no solution besides using an external tool such as (as you've already found) SVGWeb. Unfortunately, javascript support for SVG can differ between browsers, and there is no way to fix this.
As for PDF, I think that raster images are embedded if they are embedded within the SVG itself, or linked if the SVG's is linked. This is easy to do by going to Extensions > Images > select either Embed Images or Extract Images.
You can program a java applet with Processing. It's cross-browser, can export to pdf. Bitmap images would remain bitmap images embedded in the pdf.
Related
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).
I have a WordPress site with lots of custom fields that contain images in .svg format.
Now I want to add support to IE8, which won't display SVG, so I need to find a solution.
The first thing I think of is to add custom fields to add a .png along with every .svg on the site, but this means to go through each and every custom fields to modify them...
I've also seen that there's a library called Raphael.js that supports IE, but it's intended to draw the SVGs, and I already have many complex SVGs created with Illustrator, so this is not a solution for me...
Is there any way (i.e. JS library) that, each time you want to load a SVG with:
<img src="http://mydomain/Homepage-1.svg" alt="Image Alt">
it automatically converts it to plain image?
You can include a call for Adobe's SVG Viewer for IE8
see:
http://www.iegallery.com/en-us/Addons/Details/444
It still works nicely for svg including filters.
Adobe SVG Viewer was discontinued in 2009. I still have clients from time to time that have need of support for IE8. This page has a few polyfills worth trying:
https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/wiki/HTML5-Cross-Browser-Polyfills#svg
You'll need to decide what you want your fallback to be, Flash, Canvas, Silverlight, and then choose the right solution for you.
I'm trying to understand what people use canvas for?
I see it on job postings I read about it in Definitive JavaScript, but I don't quite get what it is used for.
I understand that you can draw 2d or 3d ( usually 2d ) objects but why no just use Gimp or Photoshop and upload the image.
Is it so you can create dynamic images based on say...user-specific data?
What is a practical example or perhaps a link to a professional implementation of canvas ( Definite JavaScript show basis stuff like drawing circles ).
MDN Tutorial
I have used a canvas to draw a graph, and it falls back to requesting a PHP-generated image if the browser doesn't support <canvas>. It's always a good idea to delegate processing from the server to the client, as this places less load on the server. In other words, instead of the server going "here's the stuff", it's more like "here's the data and the instructions to show it".
Another use I've seen is to highlight areas of an imagemap when moused over.
<canvas> is central in HTML5 game development, since it is used to draw the entire game viewport. Without it, there is no game.
Is it so you can create dynamic images based on say...user-specific data?
Yes
We used <canvas> to build interactive design editor for apparel in our e-commerce store — http://printio.ru/tees/new
The kind of interactivity we provide was only possible with Flash until recently.
Even on back end, we use Node.js and <canvas>-based image processing+generation to take data from online editor and create designs that are later used in store. These canvas-generated designs are eventually printed out on tshirts, mugs, caps, bags, and so on.
I think that's a pretty practical example :)
This is all done via Fabric.js canvas library (developed by us as well).
<canvas> is used for better Performance. <canvas> is much more faster and dynamic than jpeg or anything else. Example: http://www.profistart.com/internetseiten.html here was <canvas> used for Background.
I've seen a lot of people fighting with this matter, but I can't find a proper solution, nor one that fit my needs.
I'm doing some charts with Raphael, and I basically need to get them as PNG (for export, or later use in a PDF, and some other stuff). For Firefox, Chrome, IE 9, and any other browser with SVG support is easy. There are actually two ways to achieve it: using canvg to render the SVG into a canvas element and then obtain the image data; or sending the SVG to the server (C#) and using a library to rasterize it.
The problem is, of course, IE 8 and 7. In these browsers, Raphael outputs VML, and there is no way apparently of getting the SVG source. I couldn't find any VML rasterizer, so it lets me one only solution: to translate the VML to SVG, or to redraw the paper in SVG.
I checked the vectorconvert library por PHP, that actually uses XSLT transformations to translate VML to SVG, but I couldn't make it work (I've tried several tools to test the XSL but neither seem to work).
I tried to force Raphael to output SVG to a hidden div, by changing its properties .type, .svg, and .vml properly, but that didn't work either.
I think there might be a way to write the SVG tree into a hidden DIV while in IE; despite the fact it won't be shown by the browser, the text should be there.
Does anyone knows a way to achieve it? Thanks!
To render SVG you can also use CanVG library.
It is SVG parser and renderer with canvas resulting output.
Next you can simply output pixel data from canvas to PNG.
To resolve IE limits you can use Chrome Frame.
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.