lines to vectors, vectors to GIF, [was RE: Back to svg-developers

 

 

On Tuesday, October 14, 2014 1:43 PM
Domenico Strazzullo wrote:

 

Hi David, 

Thanks for taking the time to put down a list of the available resources (the link about Ello seems to be broken). I honestly believe that none of those has quite the same mission as svg-developers. It’s easy to make a new list and then say “Hey guys, let’s move over to this other list”. But can they recreate the spirit?

Hi Domenico, all,

 

I think you are right about none of the things I mentioned having the same mission.  When someone posts a how-to question to http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-svg/  , they will assuredly be met with a “not for this forum” response. I recently posted a how-to question that was not a programming question but a work-flow question to stack-overflow and was given the same response. I know that if I posted it to Google+ I might get the one or two people who have some idea of how to approach the problem to offer informed guesses, but it would be unlikely to elicit interest or response of any of the people who “follow” me there. Likewise, Twitter. I might get a response if someone can fit a relevant link into 140 characters, but let’s try the same question here and see!

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0down vote <http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26690211/work-flow-related-rather-than-programming?noredirect=1> favorite

I have a bunch of line drawings done decades ago with India ink. Would like to know recommendations on the best way to convert curves that intersect in somewhat paradoxical ways (sorta like Escher but without the limiting attachment to physics). I'd like the curves to be minimalist in the sense of having as few control points in the stitch-wise continuous chunks of cubic beziers. Usually if one uses Illustrator or Inkscape to convert line art to vectors the resultant paths have far too many control points to be able, later, to animate, via SMIL or JavaScript. Basically I am looking to get canonical curves to accomplish the topology envisioned... sorta like http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/trefoil.svg 

“

The answer I got from someone who shared with me a lack of a concept who either of us was: “totally off-topic as a question (it's not related to any code whatsoever, and your descriptions pretty ephemeral, too), but if you're serious about vectorization, you're looking for vectormagic.com <http://vectormagic.com/>  - it costs a ridiculous amount of money (though, less than illustrator), and you literally get what you pay for. It is amazing at generating minimal point vectorizations”

Here’s a simpler example of the sort of drawing I’m talking about: http://srufaculty.sru.edu/david.dailey/pictures/exhibit/clytemnestra.gif 

Ultimately, if their are N points of inflection (parameterized as Bezier) along the curve , I would like a series of cubic Beziers, piecewise continuous and continuous in the first derivative, consisting of N+1 control points. It gets a bit tricky since some of the curves weave under one another and under themselves at points.  Ultimately, it would be nice to recognize the path objects bounded by such strokes so as to be able to fill with gradients and the like.

Illustrator introduces too many bogus points into its output, as does Inkscape – if one chooses to simplify the curve in either context, semantically crucial details are lost. 

Does anyone know of a way, short of manually tracing the drawings with a Bezier tool in a drawing package to get nice clean, and smooth curves from such drawings with a minimum of control points that remain true to the original.

The reason for wanting to minimize control points is to allow for creation of smooth animations such as in http://cs.sru.edu/~ddailey/svg/follow4.svg  

 

--------2nd question----------

There is a lot of very nice line art around: See http://okushita-blog.tumblr.com/ for example. Some of the examples there are animated gif. The nice thing about animated gif (other than that the patent has expired) is that one can post the example to social networks like GooglePlus, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter and Ello.  The animation shows up and draws people’s interest immediately.  In none of those networks, currently, (though I don’t know about Tumbr or Pinterest) can one post static SVG, let alone animated SVG.  BTW, one of the founders at Ello says that allowing direct uploads of SVG is consistent with Ello’s planning, though says there are other infrastructure issues in moving from beta to official release that are clearly more urgent (my paraphrase). So if one posts a link to an SVG someone has to click on it. That takes effort that the casual onlooker is unlikely to exert, I think.

So the question: does anyone know a nice easy way to export an SVG SMIL (let’s say a simple one that loops every 22 seconds) to animated GIF short of freezing a bevy of frames?

Cheers

David