Cameron,
Many thanks for all the answers. The discussion continues below... :-)
Cameron McCormack wrote:
<snip>
3) Do the core developers anticipate continued significant work on
Batik, and is there a rough timeline as to what is intended over the
next few years?
For me, yes. I had planned to finish off various bug fixes to get the
1.7 final release out some time around now, but my uni work has just
slurped up all my time unfortunately. Definitely within the coming
months I will get back to it. We don’t really have a development
roadmap after the 1.7 release. I guess work would focus on two things:
fixing long-standing bugs (such as
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23443,
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=31629), and SVG Tiny
1.2 functionality.
What features in particular are you interested in?
I didn't have anything particular in mind (given that Batik seems to
provide the support for text
that was missing in SVG 1.0, way back when I looked at SVG the first
time round.) I was more
trying to get a feel as to how ambitious/committed the Batik team was :-)
<snip>
SVG 1.1 hasn’t really fixed the text wrapping issue. SVG 1.2, on the
other hand, does. At one point the SVG 1.2 Full draft had a
specification for flowing text into shapes, and Batik has that
implemented (<flowRoot>, etc.). SVG Tiny 1.2 has a different syntax for
text wrapping, <textArea>, which does just wrapping within a rectangle.
SVG Full 1.2 will still have flowing text in arbitrary shapes, but it’s
not clear that the syntax will remain the same as what was in the draft.
What were the other deficiencies you were thinking of?
What I remember particularly are the lack of wrapping, and the lack of
support for newlines.
I definitely appreciate the clarification on which version has addressed
wrapping--a lot of what
I've been learning about SVG has been based on reading some of the W3
spec docs, and in many
cases, those are rather ambiguous or unclear.
<snip>
Flash is still as popular as always, though.
Unfortunately :-)
<snip>
I guess the relevant question is: what do you want to use Batik for?
Two goals, one business, one personal:
Business: Build a system enabling easy graphing of financially-related
data, including annotations
and so forth. This is my primary interest in Batik/SVG. The need here
would be for robust generation
of final static data (in the form of an image, PDF, etc.) Batik seems to
offer everything I need, and
given the text features I'm just learning about, may offer most things
that I want also :-). I've noticed
that the complex text flow examples in the 1.7 distro seem to have some
bugs, but am guessing that
won't affect my uses, which would just be footnotes, notes placed on a
graph, and so on.
Personal: Build (in Java/JRuby) a structured editor, i.e. one that
operates directly on the semantic structure
of a program, document, or other structured data file. Doing this in a
way that is really useful requires
a fairly flexible but easy-to-define method of mapping internal
structure to screen representation, so
Batik/SVG is of interest because it provides so much already. However, I
need to investigate a lot more
of the dynamic aspect of Batik (responsiveness, reflow, ease of
dynamically working with the SVG DOM
before going further down this path. It's lower-priority than the
business goal above.
Many thanks again for the comprehensiveness of your reply and for your time,
Ken
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