on improving Batik's usability

["Ruud Steltenpool, http://svg.startpagina.nl" <sv...@steltenpower.com>]

Hello,

"Batik is great, more people should use it (to improve on the greater 
SVG state), and ease of use is the way to make that happen" is in a 
nutshell what i wrote before.

As seen below i did get some helpful reply, but nothing about whether 
any of my ideas are on the Batik roadmap.

Could someone please give me a good estimate of if/when/where/how these 
ideas will/might get realized?

Thanks, Ruud

===========================================================================

Cameron McCormack wrote:
 > Hi Ruud.
 >
 > Ruud Steltenpool:
 >> Batik is great, but i have some ideas to make it even better, make 
more people use it especially, the keywords being fast and easy.
 >>
 >> -provide alternatives for command-line scripting (it scares away 
non-programmers)
 >
 > Yeah, I think a GUI interface for using the transcoder (and ttf2svg is
 > reasonable).  If you’d like to contribute, please do!


Here's a little contribution, some HTML: 
http://steltenpower.com/batik_form.html


 >> -An installer that gives me shortcuts in my startmenu and on my desktop.
 >
 > Sounds a bit platform specific.  If it could be just a shell
 > script/batch file, that could be ok.

That would already help a lot, and take a little


 >> -on-line services on apache.org (web-interfaces for ttf2svg, the 
pretty-printer and certainly the rasterizer, and a "WebStart Squiggle" 
button. Batik is a lot better at detecting SVG errors than most/all 
others, a validator.apache.org that gives the errors up to where Batik 
stops rendering could be a limited but rather helpful tool.
 >
 > So I do have the webstarted Squiggle on
 > http://arc.mcc.id.au/batik-nightly/, but I guess you are asking for a
 > more “official” one.

Yours is very nice, i linked it http://svg.startpagina.nl, but...
One at the Batik pages would make a lot more people notice it, those 
pages are more official and trusted, and a release version instead of a 
nightly is what many people probably prefer


 > I’m not sure about the validator idea though, especially if it didn’t
 > give any more information than just opening the document with Squiggle
 > would give.  I think a proper SVG validator would be useful, though.
 > It’d be good if validator.w3.org could do it.

You're right. I've hacked together a bit of code and made some noise at 
w3.org and openclipart.org and especially at the last one it seems to 
have started some activity on the matter.



Thanks,

Ruud

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Re: on improving Batik's usability

[Cameron McCormack <ca...@mcc.id.au>]

Hey Ruud.

Ruud Steltenpool, http://svg.startpagina.nl:
> As seen below i did get some helpful reply, but nothing about whether 
> any of my ideas are on the Batik roadmap.

Ah, well out roadmap isn’t very well defined at the moment.  :)

> Could someone please give me a good estimate of if/when/where/how these 
> ideas will/might get realized?

Re the GUIs for the included command line tools, it’d be great if these
could be done in time for the 1.7 release.  But, at the moment I (and I
assume the other committers) are pretty busy, so I’m not sure whether it
could be done.  As I said, contributions are always more than welcome,
and if you (or anyone else) could provide Swing interfaces for the
transcoder and ttf2svg tool, I’d be happy to make a bit of time to
polish them up and include them.

> Here's a little contribution, some HTML: 
> http://steltenpower.com/batik_form.html

So I think it’d need to be a Swing application to be of most help.

> >> -An installer that gives me shortcuts in my startmenu and on my desktop.
> >
> > Sounds a bit platform specific.  If it could be just a shell
> > script/batch file, that could be ok.
> 
> That would already help a lot, and take a little

We’d have to decide which platforms to support: I guess Windows and
MacOS X should be sufficient, since Linux/Unix distributions tend to
have their own packages for installation.

I really don’t know Windows well enough to write a batch file to install
Start menu links.  I could ask someone about Mac install dmgs.

> >> -on-line services on apache.org (web-interfaces for ttf2svg, the 
> pretty-printer and certainly the rasterizer, and a "WebStart Squiggle" 
> button. Batik is a lot better at detecting SVG errors than most/all 
> others, a validator.apache.org that gives the errors up to where Batik 
> stops rendering could be a limited but rather helpful tool.
> >
> > So I do have the webstarted Squiggle on
> > http://arc.mcc.id.au/batik-nightly/, but I guess you are asking for a
> > more “official” one.
> 
> Yours is very nice, i linked it http://svg.startpagina.nl, but...
> One at the Batik pages would make a lot more people notice it, those 
> pages are more official and trusted, and a release version instead of a 
> nightly is what many people probably prefer

There used to be a jnlp to run Batik from the official site ages ago,
but it disappeared.  There is the issue though of whether the jars
should be signed, and if so by whom.  Is this something other Apache
people need to know about?  (I don’t know the answers.)

Online services for the other applications would be more troublesome, as
if they were set up naïvely (i.e., just spawning a JVM to run the
application for each request) it’d take up a lot of resources (and also
be slow).  A proper server installation would need a JVM running all the
time, and CGI requests to be farmed off to it.  I don’t know whether
that is easily set up on the current apache.org server.

> > I’m not sure about the validator idea though, especially if it didn’t
> > give any more information than just opening the document with Squiggle
> > would give.  I think a proper SVG validator would be useful, though.
> > It’d be good if validator.w3.org could do it.
> 
> You're right. I've hacked together a bit of code and made some noise at 
> w3.org and openclipart.org and especially at the last one it seems to 
> have started some activity on the matter.

I don’t think we will be looking at working on validator stuff at this
time.

Cameron

-- 
Cameron McCormack, http://mcc.id.au/
	xmpp:heycam@jabber.org  ▪  ICQ 26955922  ▪  MSN cam@mcc.id.au

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