Where is jsvectoreditor going?

[Karl Tyson]

Activity has gone way down from early 2010. Why? Is there a better
opensource online editor project based on Raphael? Is there a better
js library to emit SVG than Raphael? As far as I can tell, the answer
to both these questions is no. If I am wrong, please tell me. If I am
right, there is no reason this group is not buzzing - Raphael group
certainly is!

http://groups.google.com/group/raphaeljs/about

User with name Reporter is a spammer - needs to be stopped ASAP - who
can do that?

There is activity on the SVN commits and bug list as late as July
2010. If there are a few folks working on this project, I would like
to help. Thanks.

[Antimatter15]

I'm not actively maintaining the project anymore, it wasn't complex in the first place. Raphael abstracts almost everything away so jsvectoreditor is pretty small.

Most of the issues facing the project, the transformation issues, path manipulation, etc. I have no idea how to implement. So they remain unimplemented.

A little anecdote about vectoreditor is that it was meant to be a lightweight and slightly more predictable graphics editing core for a mini version of my Ajax animator project. That project started with my fork of the richdraw project, one of the early js svg and vml editors. Josep_ssv made onlypaths which at time was probably the greatest svg editor on the web, but it was buggy. VML was very inconsistent and it was complicated.

I thought google wave was going to be big so that was in art the reason of the mini Ajax animator. I assumed that wave would support Internet explorer so that justified jsvectoreditor. Very early in raphael's history, I tried making a little experiment: opr, onlypaths in Raphael. Raphael was too new and buggy so it wasn't practical for another year.

The project svg-edit is promising. It's actually good enough for artistically inclined people to use it to real effect without too much hassle (I've only seen two real works of art made in jsvectoreditor).

The future of the Internet no doubt will not retain early IE versions. IE 9 has great svg support (I think) so svg-edit and those other projects like the canvas based fabric.js are where the innovation will occur.

Raphael is limited to what IE 6 supports. VML is no doubt powerful, but it pales in comparison to what can be done today with svg and canvas. Dmitry has stated that there are things that will not exist in Raphael because ie can't support it.

If you would like to maintain jsvectoreditor I can make you the project owner

Sent from my iPhone

[Karl Tyson]

OK Thanks.

Somehow I missed svg-edit when I originally searched for an editor in
this space. It is clearly the most advanced I have seen so far.

I don't really care about VML, and I agree that Raphael will hit a
wall because of it. It seems we are far enough away from a smooth
consolidation of canvas and svg that I don't need to worry about a
side-by-side canvas editing capability yet.

What I need is a lightweight online editor to quickly make basic
outline shapes and rudimentary icons for mixing with maps and diagrams
and text in html5. I want to be able to extract a basic JSON data
format as storage/transport mechanism. The editor end would have
authoring tools and the display end (separate library perhaps) merely
re-constructs the svg (or other shape format maybe) from JSON and asks
the browser to render it. I keep thinking I need the graphic
equivalent of Codemirror...but it is hard to see text/code in the same
conceptual viewport as graphics.

What do you think - would I be better off working from svg-edit, or
would I do better to try to adapt jsvectoredit, which is really pretty
darn close to what I want already?

On Oct 5, 11:10 pm, Antimatter15 <antimatte...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm not actively maintaining the project anymore, it wasn't complex in the first place. Raphael abstracts almost everything away so jsvectoreditor is pretty small.
>
> Most of the issues facing the project, the transformation issues, path manipulation, etc. I have no idea how to implement. So they remain unimplemented.
>
> A little anecdote about vectoreditor is that it was meant to be a lightweight and slightly more predictable graphics editing core for a mini version of my Ajax animator project. That project started with my fork of the richdraw project, one of the early js svg and vml editors. Josep_ssv made onlypaths which at time was probably the greatest svg editor on the web, but it was buggy. VML was very inconsistent and it was complicated.
>
> I thought google wave was going to be big so that was in art the reason of the mini Ajax animator. I assumed that wave would support Internet explorer so that justified jsvectoreditor. Very early in raphael's history, I tried making a little experiment: opr, onlypaths in Raphael. Raphael was too new and buggy so it wasn't practical for another year.
>
> The project svg-edit is promising. It's actually good enough for artistically inclined people to use it to real effect without too much hassle (I've only seen two real works of art made in jsvectoreditor).
>
> The future of the Internet no doubt will not retain early IE versions. IE 9 has great svg support (I think) so svg-edit and those other projects like the canvas based fabric.js are where the innovation will occur.
>
> Raphael is limited to what IE 6 supports. VML is no doubt powerful, but it pales in comparison to what can be done today with svg and canvas. Dmitry has stated that there are things that will not exist in Raphael because ie can't support it.
>
> If you would like to maintain jsvectoreditor I can make you the project owner
>
> Sent from my iPhone  
>

[Kevin]

I like svg-edit more, but if jsvectoreditor is close already, then it would be much better to base it off jsvectoreditor. svg-edit is split between two files, one 125K and the other 325K. It's huge and quite intimidating.

jsvectoreditor is three files, editor, shape and tracker, the largest one is 18K. If jsvectoreditor is close, it should be relatively easy to add new features.

[Karl Tyson]

So in jsvectoreditor I might have drawn something and saved off a JSON
file stored as:

var mySVGData = [{"type":"rect","id":"zCBs","fill":"#ff0000","fill-
opacity":1,"height":127,"stroke":"#000000","stroke-opacity":1,"stroke-
width":1,"width":128,"x":211,"y":105.5}];

I could load that in with jsvectoreditor functions:

import_shapes()
foreach...
loadShape(item)

then I get back the raw svg by:

editor.getMarkup()

then I insert that into my dynamically constructed html page.

The problem is that I have to "draw" the shapes merely to convert the
JSON to SVG. It seems there ought to be a parsing engine, like one
might do in XSLT, to simply turn the JSON directly into SVG without
the drawing engine in the middle. But that's alright - it works!

Question: Is the process I described here possible, easier, in svg-
edit?

I am very impressed with your initial direction with ajaxanimator. Why
did you abandon it again? Can svg-edit accomplish the same thing?

[Antimatter15]

I never totally abandoned it, I stop working on it every year, and do
small updates periodically. Eventually I would like to switch it's
editor to svg-edit.

The jsvectoredit json is just an array of svg attributes. It's one
dimensional as jsvectoreditor doesn't support groups. Just loop each
element and add the string <.type attr1=attr2...></.type>

Sent from my iPhone

On Oct 7, 2010, at 7:02 PM, Karl Tyson <tyson...@gmail.com> wrote:

>

[Antimatter15]

I don't believe svg-edit has a json representation of the canvas.

Also it's been a while I'm not sure if the element names with .type
always matches up with path, polygon, line.

Sent from my iPhone