semi/signal

I’m working on a little SVG project using Raphaël. Unfortunately, Illustrator exports polygons in its SVG output which is not supported by Raphaël (only paths are supported). So I wrote an app to convert the SVG polygon string to an SVG path string.

the conversion…

Note that you only input the points data from the polygon (from the points attribute), not the entire polygon element. The result is the path string for the d attribute of the path element.

The conversion is very simple and based upon the fact that a polygon is a path starting with an absolute moveto, linetos to each of the points, and a closepath (this bug report [yes, a bug report!] was pretty helpful).

I actually wanted to render the output, but I was disappointed to discover that Adobe Air doesn’t currently support SVG.

The main reason for not including it was runtime size concerns (adding it would have increased the runtime size by 15 to 20 percent). Initially, the main pain-points regarding AIR were the size of the runtime, integration with the operating system and native APIs, support for the <canvas> tag and new CSS properties, and JavaScript performance. These priorities, coupled with a trend toward reduced interest in SVG graphics, led to SVG support not being included in the current version of Adobe AIR.

I stumbled across an interesting project on reddit yesterday, it’s called Firelight and it’s basically a system that utilizes Javascript + SVG + XAML. It’s still in its infancy and I’m pretty iffy on XAML in general, but it’s a pretty cool idea nonetheless.