On 02-Dec-2013 11:06, Chris Lilley wrote:
Something else entirely - supporting the SVG use of SMIL animation and timing which has been in SVG ever since version 1.0 in 1998.
However, for Inkscape to do anything much with SMIL it would seem like it would have to go from (x,y) to (x,y,t) for pretty much every visible object, and that seems like a pretty major change to make for what may be a niche application.
It is indeed a fairly major change. Its certainly not niche. Outside of print, interactive dynamic vector graphics are just as common as static ones. The lack of a good visual authoring tool for creating animated SVG is frequently cited as a major drawback.
Ah, I think I see what you want.
First you want Inkscape to support these tags:
<set> <animate> <animateMotion> <animateColor> <animateTransform>
The standard apparently allows every object to have its own animation properties running on its own clock. Supporting the rendering of that in Inkscape is going to be extremely hard to get right. Inkscape is not super fast at drawing complex things and I suspect it wouldn't take a very complicated set of animation commands before it could not keep up. (Not that I expect the browsers are going to be able to keep up with super complicated animated SVG's either.) Conversely, if Inkscape had a a single "master time" setting (slider?), it would certainly be able to render for any collection of tags like this
<animate attributeName="cx" from="0" to="100" dur="10s" repeatCount="indefinite" />
how the drawing would look in a compliant browser at 2.2 seconds. That would let inkscape produce and edit this sort of animation, just not display it in real time.
So you probably also want Inkscape to be able to render one of these animations to other animated formats from the command line like:
inkscape -z \ --time-start=0.0 --time-end=10.0 --time-int=0.1 \ --export-width=640 --export-height=480 \ --export-animated-gif=result.gif animated.svg
Is that about right?
Regards,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech