Bryce Harrington wrote:
Animation is on the roadmap, yes, although it's a considerable ways off. Of course, if someone were to take an interest in working on it, we'd certainly have no problem accepting a patch early. ;-)
But there has been some good bits of news on these fronts:
Ishmal has added ECMA code to the codebase and hooked in compile support, which gets us onto the path of having Javascript in the SVG; this can be used for animation, and is the reason for adding it.
Those interested in helping work on this aspect of animation could probably find some nice bite-sized bits to implement to help Ishmal. For example, he currently needs a "Run Button" added to the UI, that will invoke the embedded Javascript in a file.
What I've done so far is start working on an SVGViewer class, that could be spawned from Inkscape. It is a GtkMM class, and I am in a bit of a hold, waiting for 0.39 to be released before I do more on this, as there are some things I need, and I don't want to break anything. Also, the day job has been keeping my busy recently (actually using Inkscape on the job to do avionics mockups for simulations, a lot of fun).
The idea is to: 1) Launch the SVGViewer from the current document view, much like a "Preview" window. 2) Clone the current document's repr tree (or Mental's AST tree), and set the viewer's source to that. 3) Bind ECMA to the tree 4) Display, and route events to ECMA 5) When done, throw everything away. Why? You probably don't want the script to modify the document you are editing.
This is the current status. If someone would like to help, they could look at src/ecma/SVGViewer.cpp, and improve my silly embedding of SP code in the GtkMM widget. I am working on scripting, after all, not reinventing Inkview. However, if this thing works, maybe it could be used as a general-purpose viewer widget, and be moved out of src/ecma to somewhere else.
According to the roadmap, the main task for 0.39--->0.40 is GtkMM-ization, so there should be a lot of synchronicity here.
Bob