[HN Gopher] An interactive guide to SVG paths ___________________________________________________________________ An interactive guide to SVG paths Author : nansdotio Score : 171 points Date : 2023-07-03 15:50 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.nan.fyi) (TXT) w3m dump (www.nan.fyi) | iza wrote: | This SVG path editor is incredibly useful if you're building or | editing SVGs by hand: https://yqnn.github.io/svg-path-editor/ | gunapologist99 wrote: | You can also do this in inkscape (although you have to hand- | edit if you want to really optimize it) | samstave wrote: | I've built so many custom SVGs in Inkscape - I used to be an | expert at it, but that information evaporates QUICKLY - and I | open inkscape, and I cant even recall the mappings any | longer... | | But inkscape had a lot of really fast keybindings that helped | me on many a huge project... | Gualdrapo wrote: | Yes but what I really like of that tool is that it "dissects" | the entire d parameter into its bits and it's much easier to | understand what's going on, and draw "parametrically" stuff - | whereas with Inkscape the process is way more organic and you | just can pretty much forget about the innards of it. | gifkfkg7gfj wrote: | Also good: https://svg-path-visualizer.netlify.app/ | | That one might even be better for some people. | politelemon wrote: | Not sure if it's me, it says NaN above the title, and the button | that says "Bend!" or "Straighten" doesn't actually do anything. | I've tried multiple hard refreshes. | jer0me wrote: | NaN is the name of the blog. The animation is working for me on | iOS Safari, but the text isn't aligned perfectly. | csallen wrote: | This happened to me, too. You have to scroll down to get the | Bend/Straighten button to work. Basically, the visuals on the | right side of the page correspond to what part of the | instructions you have scrolled top the top. | joemi wrote: | The NaN fooled me too, before I realized it was in the domain | name too and must just be the name. | wbobeirne wrote: | > it says NaN above the title | | That is the name of the blog, the domain is nan.fyi. | WillAdams wrote: | Back when I helped out on the assembly instructions for the | Shapeoko 2: | | http://shapeoko.github.io/Docs/index.html | | one of the things which was worked up was a way to make an SVG | interactive: | | http://shapeoko.github.io/Docs/content/tPictures/PS20028-100... | | (click on part #11 in the list --- in retrospect the parts of the | drawing itself should have highlighted the matching part entry in | the list) | nologic01 wrote: | Beatutifully made guide. | | The numerical represention of Bezier curves is quite a challenge | to internalize and the clean interactive canvas helps build some | intuition. | | Vector graphics and SVG deserve far more love. | dvt wrote: | Amazing guide, love how "tactile" the animations feel! | bobthepanda wrote: | SVG is quite nice. | | It would be a lot nicer if the proposal for SVG 2 was ever | adopted, but that has been stuck in draft for years. | https://svgwg.org/svg2-draft/ | danielvaughn wrote: | It's a shame because SVG is amazing. I came to web development | from the art/design world, and I'd been using Adobe Illustrator | for years. I was really excited to learn that I could program | vectors, but was shocked to learn how little the average | developer knew about them or SVG (at the time). | Noujin wrote: | A few months ago I looked into how to do an angled gradient in | SVG and was baffled that is isn't supported. Now looking at | this spec, it's also not in there. Why the hell is this | something nobody talks about. Photoshop has it since ages... | appleflaxen wrote: | What are the key differences? | | Why hasn't it been? | bobthepanda wrote: | SVG 1.1, the last widely supported standard, came out in | 2003, and the web has changed a lot in 20 years. | | There are a lot of changes (probably a factor in lack of | support) but broadly it is to bring CSS support to SVG, that | the browsers have been doing for years. | | I worked on a side project to learn SVG and the two biggest | features that SVG 2 has is | | * support for z-index. SVG elements are currently rendered in | the order they are written in markup. This is very annoying | if you have common groups of things that interweave with | other things visually; but you can't put them under a single | element to select. | | * HTML style text rendering. Today in HTML, you can have text | respect a container's width and break to newline when needed, | and you can align any corner of a text element to the general | CSS box model. SVG text does not have a way to specify a | width, and you can only align to the baseline of the first | line of multiline text. This is _very_ infuriating. | | --- | | The major reason for lack of progress is that updating the | w3c standards is like herding cats; and SVG needs to include | the professional authoring tools that produce it, which is | the 800-pound gorilla that is Adobe Creative, and everyone | else trying to eat Adobe's lunch, so it's hardly a | cooperative bunch. | samstave wrote: | I may be talking out my butt ; but, wouldnt it be cool - if | you had a slicer that made individual layers for visible | elements on base elements, where, when stacked, you can hit | a button and make all the sub layers for the components | from such that were visible in the final image? | | Does exist? | | -- | | Yes! | | What I was poorly articulating was the need for you to have | that final stacked image with Z positioning, then be able | to still have the visibly layered elements turned into | their own layer for their own cutting (assume you have a | partion of the model which is in background, and you want | to chop that shape to its own element, such that you can | cut/print on different colors/mediums, but have it still | hit the image... | | It should take the VISIBLE parts of an element in the final | satack, then create layers for each of the components from | each layer, then provide a template for printing out mass | numers of each component in a zero waste model to allow for | more | bobthepanda wrote: | I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, but that's | effectively what the current model forces you to do, to | specify the elements in order that they go on top of each | other. This is very bad. | | I would rather have z-index so I can group elements how I | want and use z-index to dictate the final display order. | ttfkam wrote: | Here's a feature I desperately wanted a dozen years ago. | Browser vendors kind of lost interest in improving their SVG | support around that time. | | https://dev.w3.org/SVG/modules/vectoreffects/master/SVGVecto. | .. | spookie wrote: | It's quite perplexing when SVGs have a lot of potential in | responsive UX. I don't get it. | ygra wrote: | Browser vendors seem to prefer SVG to be a somewhat dumb | vector format and already hate many of the more complex | parts. SVG 2 originally intended to have a bunch of more | interesting features, but eventually resistance from | implementors (mostly browsers) whittled it down to some | clarifications of the spec along with a bit of CSS/HTML 5 | harmonization. | denvaar wrote: | Love the detail and thought that has been put into this post, | along with the other blog posts as well. Visualizations and | animations go along way. A very ascetically pleasing site that is | informative as well. | 082349872349872 wrote: | I agree on the aesthetic quality of the entire site. | | Given the amount of detail included in the post, I was | surprised that the author didn't mention that the primitives | used in the _d_ attribute for the _< path>_ element allow one | to synthesise most of the other SVG elements ... or did I just | miss that somewhere? ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-03 23:00 UTC)