Re: [Swftools-common] what's the best svg to swf method?

[Neal Murphy]

On Wednesday 10 August 2005 10:03, Jacek Brzeski wrote:
> Matthias Kramm wrote:
> >On Wed, Aug 10, 2005 at 12:25:39PM +0200, Jacek Brzeski wrote:
> >>I'm thinking about some sort of svg -> pdf conversion and then pdf ->
> >>swf with the swfc tools. What do you think about that? And (if it's a
> >>good idea) is there a svg 2 pdf good tool (maybe without java, the best
> >>would be to download it from packages for debian).
> >
> >I'm not aware of any "direct" svg2pdf converters. You can save to .ps
> >from inkscape, though, and then use ps2pdf.
> >OpenOffice can also export pdf, if you manage to import your svg into
> >it (there are rumors that an SVG import filter for OO exists).
> >
> >Greetings
> >
> >Matthias
>
> Thanks.
> But I was hoping to get maximum effort - I have svg graphics that is
> 15kb. It is literally about 50 lines and about 30 fills. I'm importing
> it from svg to pdf (I discovered that possibility in scribus), then to
> swf (using pdf2swf tool) and it is 65kb big... For 50 lines it's a big
> too much, although it looks really nice. But I wanted to get about
> 5-10kb swf...

It almost sounds like a font is being embedded in the swf. I had created a 
simple swf containing a small jpeg and some text (using ArialBlack and Impact 
fonts). The swf was over 100KB. When I eliminated Impact, the size dropped to 
about 60KB. After that, I editted the ArialBlack font and eliminated all 
unused glyphs; this got the swf down to about 15KB.

This leads me to a potential request for pdf2swf: during the conversion, would 
it be possible to discard all unused glyphs in any fonts that are used? I am, 
of course, assuming that the resultant swf has static content.

>
> So - maybe another question - what GUI for designing graphics would you
> suggest? That wouldn't cause problems with importing...? And is there
> any future plan for creating svg2swf tool in swfc?

I went round and round, and finally decided the vector graphics tools 
available for Linux aren't yet ready for prime time. But they *are* making 
progress. Inkscape sure looks promising, even at v0.42. Karbon14 (part of 
koffice) has a long way to go as yet.

For *really* simple stuff, I've been known to use xfig and export to PS or 
PDF. For somewhat more complex things, I've often written PostScript code 
directly, but there's no GUI when editting text. :) For the more complicated 
stuff, I bit the bullet and bought Illustrator - and have a laptop running 
Windows; part of the reason for Illustrator is that it is still the industry 
standard for making decals, t-shirts, signs, et al.

I would expect that once the SVG format become more commonly used, Matthias or 
a volunteer will start work on a converter.
-- 
Neal P. Murphy, CIO
  Diesel Hot Rod Association, Inc.
  Website, Information Systems
  540-384-6159; 540-312-6159 (mobile)
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