At 12:56 AM 1/17/2007, Larry wrote: >The decision by Adobe to pull support for their plugin is causing >concern by current and potential clients of SVG-based components that >I have built. Before I began using SVG a number of years back, I >built a few samples with VML. Now I must give an estimate on the >effort to support VML as well as SVG in 1 of my projects (others to >follow ?). I spent today mapping the SVG features I utilized to their >counterpart in VML but a few important items remain. I'm looking for >the equivalent of marker-end/marker-mid as well as getPointAtLength. >Do they exist or can they be synthesized out of other available >elements? Any examples or pointers would be most welcome. >Thanks in advance, >Larry
I worked with VML for a year or two and would not be happy with the task you are facing. In terms of the getPointAtLength method of SVG, I don't think there is a counterpart. As I recall the <path>'s in VML were pretty simple - - aren't Bezier's limited to 4 pts? I would probably resort to crude approximation. If you wish to follow an ellipse, for example, the integral of the associated parametric equation is not to be expressed in closed algebraic form (see http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/formulas/faq.ellipse.circumference.html, for example). I'd probably parse the <path> data into linear, bezier and elliptic components, estimating the length of each of those and then muck something together accordingly. Ick. Part of why bezier curves became so popular is that they can be computed quickly, so the code to do that is no doubt floating around here and there. I didn't play much with the gradients in VML, but my impression was that they too were crude in comparison to what SVG has -- good luck approximating those (fortunately, I suppose, we don't yet have mesh gradients in SVG -- those would be terrible to patch together with linear and radial pieces). If your clients are able to see VML , then the non-Microsoft world is apparently not so important to them, so I'd probably look into XAML. From what I've heard it's closer to SVG than VML would be, but I haven't played with it at all myself. Opera and Firefox are pretty nice, apparently Safari is too. DD ----- To unsubscribe send a message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -or- visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers and click "edit my membership" ---- Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/svg-developers/join (Yahoo! ID required) <*> To change settings via email: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
