Gideros Illustrator

techdojo

@jack0088 - personally I'd keep the SVG parser as a completely separate tool that will take in an SVG file of your choice and then spit out a GI "native" format data file. That will keep the code a LOT simpler on the actual device and also will mean that you could hide your "secret sauce" that actually parsed the SVG format

bowerandy

@jack088, your suggestions for using different classes of parser for the different types of SVG file seems reasonable. I think you *should* write your JSON table to a file though (or it could be optional). Then, if you include an MD5 or date stamp in the JSON then you can use this to check if the SVG has been changed and, if not, skip the reparsing of the SVG XML.

I've been playing around with GI this morning and one of the features I found myself wanting most was gradient fills. This is because, in order to get good resolution independence I need to be able to avoid including rasterized images in the SVG wherever possible.

I can see why this is tricky since Gideros doesn't yet support gradient filling of Shapes. Pity. Even when render to texture is supported it's going to be rather difficult to do. I guess you could write a plugin that took a fill specification and created a texture file from that?

Best regards

bowerandy

@jack088, I thought it might be convenient to be able to use Illustrator symbols with GI. To enable this I've made some changes to SvgParser.lua and I'm attaching the Diff file to this post. Please feel free to incorporate the changes into your base source if you wish; you can remove my initials fro the comments - they are only there so you can see what I've changed.

It was fairly straightforward to do apart from the fact the symbols seem to have a centre anchor point and I had to do some tricky matrix translations to account for this but only in the case where the instance of the symbol has a transformation.

BTW, in your documentation you mention the fact that Illustrator generates unique file names for embedded graphics. What I've found is that if you delete all the unique files from your destination folder before saving out the SVG then Illustrator will reuse the same names. This means that you don't have to keep adding new unique files to your Gideros project each time you change the SVG.

Best regards

jack0088

That was very busy year, especially the second half of it. As soon as a left my studies things got suddenly complicated. I wasn't able to get a job and out of frustration and disappointment I began to work at home, on different projects I had in mind, to divert myself and not wasting time.

- I crafted and released an alpha of »Gideros Illustrator«, which I'm kind of proud of, because as I went through the development I even had no idea of Lua. But see what I came up with in ! This is great.
- Next, I wrote a children's book, Der Schlafräuber, and released it on Amazon and iTunes. And this was the reason why G.I. dev. stopped for a while.
- Had a few job interviews (some of them just took my time which I could have used more meaningful and productive).
- I planed out some future projects and began with some of them already, because I wasn't patient :P

For the last three days I took the time to get back into web development, because I had to give Owltwins a face. And since we have christmas tomorrow, I got extra motivated to get it done by today's evening. The will was beyond reach ... but finally I did!

Gideros Illustrator has now a new home - Owltwins. Which is kind of my "company name" for all my projects and inventions and (hopefully) for my future customers which need some advertising (corporate design, websites, flyers, ...)
Next, I'll update the G.I. project site. I would like to see it more attractive for potential users. In near future I will build out my projects step-by-step - update G.I. and maybe make Gideros Illustrator also available for Codea? ... We will see. Well, that's the plan!

If you like, check out Owltwins (http://go.to/owltwins), download Gideros Illustrator (http://go.to/gideros-illustrator) and drop a comment!
Merry Christmas.