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The Adobe SVG Viewer has supported a variation on the SMIL audio element since version 1.0 (released in 2000).

The SVG 1.2 draft specification incorporates support for the SMIL audio and video elements.

Adobe just released a developer preview release of Adobe SVG Viewer 6.0 which includes support for both of the SVG 1.2 specification versions of the audio and video elements.

The SVG 1.0 specification includes support for SMIL animation and interactivity which means that you can have declarative animation and interactivity that doesn't require JavaScript. The Adobe SVG Viewer has supported this since version 1.0. And SVG and ASV also support full JavaScript control of the SVG DOM, of course.

The Adobe SVG Viewer has supported a variation on the SMIL audio element since version 1.0 (released in 2000).

The SVG 1.2 draft specification incorporates support for the SMIL audio and video elements.

Adobe just released a developer preview release of Adobe SVG Viewer 6.0 which includes support for both of the SVG 1.2 specification versions of the audio and video elements.

The SVG 1.0 specification includes support for SMIL animation and interactivity which means that you can have declarative animation and interactivity that doesn't require JavaScript. The Adobe SVG Viewer has supported this since version 1.0. And SVG and ASV also support full JavaScript control of the SVG DOM, of course.

Ok SVG is trying to be like Flash in scope, but i don't see anything besides animation. I see nothing about syncing with audio or adding interactive elements.

Here is info on synching with audio. And on synching with video and there are hundreds of examples of interactivity. Most SVG's on the Web are interactive. For instance: asteroids in SVG. A bunch of demos including a paint program written in SVG.

SVG is really much, much more than a vector based image format though; it's an entire animation/effects plugin which will work seamlessly with current standards such as XHTML, MathML, CSS, and JavaScript (ECMAScript if you wish to be technical).

Adobe has already placed some very nice demos of embedding SVG within standard web pages. Take a look at some of the things that can be done with it, and you'll quickly see how the SVG standard can

• Replace large graphics with smaller XML code and custom effects
• Replace most of what Flash is: a proprietary language for interactive vector animation. The newer versions of Flash have some very nice extras, but for the most part, SVG can really dig into Macromedia's space if it's adopted by people other than just geeks, and being backed by Adobe is a very good sign.
• Allow accessibility within stylized content. Very few Flash animations on the web nowadays have any type of accessible content.

As far as the extra size in download goes, most people have to download Acrobat Reader to read PDF files, which are very common on the web. If SVG ever achieves the same status, I will be very encouraged as a web designer.

Now, if they would only get X3D in order...

SVGmaker gallery
Kevin Lindsey
Adobe examples
Andreas Neumann's Vienna GIS example

(1) While I agree with some
posters that there is a danger of distributing unfinishend
implementations, having a NATIVE SVG is a real breakthrough though.
Quote: "Mozilla can handle documents that contain SVG, MathML, XHTML,
SMIL, etc. all mixed together in the same 'compound' document.... ".
Means for instance that you can simply add a little vector graphic INTO
your XHTML code instead of importing png. Also means that the same
DOM/Ecma interface can be used to program dynamic websites, or that you
can dynamically transform XML contents into XHTML/SVG with XSLT
client-side on the fly...

(2) On another note: Adobe's Plug-in version 6.0 BETA is available. And
it does not crash Mozilla 1.4 (Win2k) when embedded in HTML. In order
to install it with Mozilla (tested with Moz 1.4/Win2k) you must copy
the 2 files from:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\SVG Viewer 6.0\Plugins\*
to c:\Program Files\Mozilla.org\Mozilla\Plugins\ Did not see any Unix
version :(

http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/beta.html

PS: Plugin v3.0 kills Moz 1.4 (and others if you don't use iframes)

(3) There are some really cool SVG sites. My favorites:

http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/
(cool examples)

http://www.protocol7.com/svg-wiki/
(documentation about obscuret extensions,
i.e. shows how to get/post to URLS from within SVG ...)
- K

First off, let me say that I have toyed around with the Corel SmartGraphics Studio, and I think that it's a very good first pass at simplifying the process of creating SVG for a lot of users. As a big fan of SVG, I appreciate all the effort that Corel has put forth.

That being said, I think that the Open Source community should know that dSVG is only one of three UI-defining proposals that the SVG Working Group is considering for SVG 1.2. One of the other two, currently known as RCC, proposes the ability to create a kind of template with a separation of style and functionality, but defined in the document rather than being built in the plug-in. Ultimately, I think that this is a better way to go, since it is far more adaptable. It uses scripting and an XSLT-like syntax to transform semantic content into graphical elements (like form controls, scrollbars, etc.). The last proposal, Live Templates, seems like a generalized case of RCC, and I suspect they could be married together.

Adobe has released a tech preview of ASV6, the next version of their plugin (Windows only for now). It implements an early version of RCC (as well as some other cool features like text wrapping, audio, video, and external resources), and looks very promising. At SVG-Open, I saw an RCC forms widget toolkit for SVG, which worked well and weighed in at all of 6KB. I also saw ASV6pr working on a Linux box, and with the latest build of Mozilla. It's still buggy, but it's more conformant to the Spec than ever.

May the best spec proposal win!

In other news, the excellent Batik (an OSS SVG toolkit) also released a stable 1.5 last week.

Basically, SVG is getting really exciting.

The Adobe SVG viewer recently, and surprizingly, had a beta of version 6.0 come out. This can be found here. Of course because the Mozilla folks changed the plug-in mechanisms, it still crashes Mozilla, but this is great news from Adobe as many rumors were that the entire SVG team was canned. Obviously that isn't true, and they continue to develop upon it. Corel, as you obviously know if you read even the summary of this article, has a great viewer out as well, along with a variety of tools for working with SVG.

Of course MSDN Magazine covered SVGs last month. Of course I'm biased given that I wrote that article.

Well, props to all the people who told me about Shift-Alt-Apple-F. I'll find that useful. Just a couple of responses to some of this guy's other (good) points:

1. At my office we have a little colour inkjet which we use for printing out mockups of pages. Unsurprisingly, it's not PS, and why the hell should it have to be?? You can improve the quality of an image's preview by turning down its dpi in Photoshop (how intuitive). But because you can't shrink images below 10%, you can't just automatically set everying to 10 dpi and forget about it. Which sucks.

2. As for crashing while rendering previews - I was working with a GIF that was about 3k x 4k pixels. I'd saved it as a GIF because hell, the thing was only black and white anyway, so GIF made for a much smaller file than TIFF. Maybe the bug's just in the GIF parser. Or maybe it was something else entirely. *shrug* I dunno. It happened.

3. I want to work with pages that are different sizes. Our print house knows that the front page is printed on thicker stock, and it's larger because it includes the spine. But they still want me only to send them one PDF, and my boss still wants to have just one file per issue in the archive. The fact that the software doesn't support this (meaning I have to do it manually in Acrobat) ain't, so far as I'm concerned, a plus point.

4. Speaking of Acrobat, you seem to be implying that I'm not using it. Can you make PDFs from Quark 5 without using Acrobat? I'd love to know how. It's Quark's insistence on creating an intermediary .PS file to send to Distiller that makes the whole process so slow and ungainly. Is there a better way? Apart from the obvious.

5. Embedding images is extremely helpful when you're working in a networked environment and idiots keep moving your cheese. At any rate, I absolutely don't want the newest version of an image in my document: I want the version I imported! Sure, there are lots of reasons why you might not want to embed things - but again, I don't think that's an argument in favour of not giving me the option.

To me it seems there is a lot out of order in the company you work at.

*lol* You don't know the half of it. But on a day to day basis I generally find Quark's failings much harder to accept and work around than those of my boss.

Let me start off by saying that I don't like XPress either, being XPress user for seven years now. But I have to disagree on some points you are missing or misstating.

It insists on showing graphics onscreen only as low resolution previews, and won't even print them at high resolution.

Nope, it prints images just fine once you disable the low resolution switch in the print options, which you seem to have enabled. And, of course, you need a postscript printer.

Its undo facility is embarrassingly underpowered

This is a polite way of saying that it sucks ass, which it does.

nor is there any equivalent to InDesign's "fit image proportionally to box"

Of course there is. Shift-Alt-Apple-F will do what you want. It's there since XPress 3, and it's well documented in the handbook I might add.

It crashes while trying to render previews of graphics that are too large.

Now there's an interesting thing - I am working at a rather large advertising agency, and we regularly use images which are well beyond the 1 GB barrier, sometimes even approach 2 GB. I have never seen one of our machines crash on this. They need a bit to render, and they need a bit to load the image thereafter, but they never crashed. Are you sure your machines are properly set up, your RAM is okay and your image data isn't corrupted?

It won't let you make different pages different sizes.

Of course it won't, because this is a bad idea. Things are printed in one and only one size. If you need something in another size, it will be printed in the other size anyway. Go to a printing company and look at how things are printed. Look at the technical details. Really, this is not a flame. Do it, and you will understand much better.

Creating a PDF is maddeningly slow and often requires gigabytes of disk space to eventually create a 100Mb file.

You are right, but if you use the right tool for the job, the pain goes away.

Its native file format doesn't support embedding fonts or even images

No, but it supports collecting them into a directory together with the layout. Hint: Embedding images into a layout is a stupid idea in a professional production environment. You can only ensure that the latest version of an image is used for printing if you use it freshly from the server the moment you print. Usually projects are worked at in teams, some people edit the images, some do the layout stuff - this would be a real mess with embedded images.

Speaking of OPI hell, as long as I used healthy data (meaning cleaning those TIFFs off the unused mask channels and paths and make sure the EPS files have all separations available), I never encountered any problems. To me it seems there is a lot out of order in the company you work at. Talk to your boss, you are in desperate need of someone who knows setup and administration of your prepress workflow.

An alternative to Quark exists, it's InDesign. It has it all to be the Quark killer:

- output supported by all printers, with excellent PDF and PostScript support
- imports Quark documents well enough
- gorgeous design and type features
- does everything XPress does, only with a better thought out user interface
- it costs half the price of Quark
- Quark is know to dish it's customers with ages-log development cycles and no user support.

And Quark still is the market leader!

So TAFL with your great news of just released free DTP software. The DTP pros *are* tiered with Quark and XPress, but you have no news for them.

Grammatica is by FAR the best grammer checker ever written. The reason being that the guys that wrote it weren't simply programmers, many of them were also Phd's in English. As far as pdf's go the specification is free and open just check Adobe's site

I would write the company at these addesses,

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/contact.html

...contact Adobeand let them know how we feel about this whole mess?

I'm sure they won't mind since we're only concerned customers with an opinion that should matter to them.

...contact Adobeand let them know how we feel about this whole mess?

I'm sure they won't mind since we're only concerned customers with an opinion that should matter to them.

...contact Adobeand let them know how we feel about this whole mess?

I'm sure they won't mind since we're only concerned customers with an opinion that should matter to them.

...contact Adobeand let them know how we feel about this whole mess?

I'm sure they won't mind since we're only concerned customers with an opinion that should matter to them.

...contact Adobeand let them know how we feel about this whole mess?

I'm sure they won't mind since we're only concerned customers with an opinion that should matter to them.

...contact Adobeand let them know how we feel about this whole mess?

I'm sure they won't mind since we're only concerned customers with an opinion that should matter to them.

...contact Adobeand let them know how we feel about this whole mess?

I'm sure they won't mind since we're only concerned customers with an opinion that should matter to them.

...contact Adobeand let them know how we feel about this whole mess?

I'm sure they won't mind since we're only concerned customers with an opinion that should matter to them.

...contact Adobeand let them know how we feel about this whole mess?

I'm sure they won't mind since we're only concerned customers with an opinion that should matter to them.

First of all. This is ADOBE PREMIERE PRO. A complete rewrite. It's possible your comparisons against the older versions of Premiere don't apply anymore. Look them up or try the program before making an ass of yourself on Slashdot.

For example, I've seen it mentioned multiple times that it can't do multiple timelines. This is wrong. According to the marketting bull it now supports multiple nested timelines.

Also, it seems they've rewritten a lot to work in Real-time. A major advantage over some of the older shit that would allow certain editting functions to get done faster.

Now it's probably fun to call Adobe a pussy or loser, let's try some of the new software or at least read a fucking page about it before we start spewing bullshit around. If you wanna spew shit, provide a link to your numbers or facts.

it's not premier, it's premier pro, a complete rewrite! have you used it? maybe you should try it first since the new version has mutliple, nestable timelines and real-time editing. it can't be as poorly as you suggest or they would've canned the product already.

A similar article here. Bottomline, after reading the 2 articles: Adobe is very sensitive about direct competition from Apple. Adobe also fears that Apple might one day start giving away Pro applications for free, which is not entirely impossible because Apple is still mainly a hardware manufacturer. What, about 75% revenue from hardware sales?

Another reason stated in the article on Digital Video Editing is:

"But Premiere Pro is a new application in the sense that it has been completely reengineered, so the jump from Premiere 6.5 to Premiere Pro would have been far more of an investment ..."

This announcement seems to follow a consistent trend at Adobe: none of the applications in the digital video editing segment get an OS X version Encore DVD, Audition, now Premiere gets the axe, when will After Effects get the boot?

A similar article here. Bottomline, after reading the 2 articles: Adobe is very sensitive about direct competition from Apple. Adobe also fears that Apple might one day start giving away Pro applications for free, which is not entirely impossible because Apple is still mainly a hardware manufacturer. What, about 75% revenue from hardware sales?

Another reason stated in the article on Digital Video Editing is:

"But Premiere Pro is a new application in the sense that it has been completely reengineered, so the jump from Premiere 6.5 to Premiere Pro would have been far more of an investment ..."

This announcement seems to follow a consistent trend at Adobe: none of the applications in the digital video editing segment get an OS X version Encore DVD, Audition, now Premiere gets the axe, when will After Effects get the boot?

Maybe like, here. Or here. Someday indeed.

Adobe tried to make webpages 3D, with Atmosphere. It never really took off. Interesting browser, fun people to chat w/, but there simply aren't enough 3D 'worlds' out there to explore... after awhile, you just get bored and fire Mozilla back up into the 2D realm.

Adobe PDF to HTML Conversion page

Show me a Linux replacement for Adobe FrameMaker (or better yet, a port) [...]

Several years ago, Adobe actually released a beta version of a port, but then decided not to release a final product based on it. Check out this page for more info. There's even a specific e-mail address for comments.

As always, only blog when you have something to say. I posted once every few days. This gave me time to see things and made sure I had some news worth posting.

Tell your readers about the places you've been to but also what you thought of the places. If you found something was worth checking out, or if you wasted your time seeing something that turned out to be dull, say so. But keep it concise, and make sure that you've said everything you want to say in a few paragraphs.

Don't bore your readers with accounts and descriptions of the people that you met/hung out with/got drunk with/kissed/whatever! No-one really cares about Eddie's Personal Soap Opera except Eddie. Just keep your blog focused on your travels.

Always include links for places or areas of interest so that people can get more info. A quick set of Google searches will make your blog much more interesting and accessible.

Make sure you use a cybercafe that allows you to pay after you've used the machines (i.e. not one where you have to buy 'credits' and where your time is being counted down on the screen all the time). It sucks to be pressured to write because you're running out of time.

Perhaps an obvious one, but use weblog software that won't break. You may not be able to telnet into your box to rework the config files when you're travelling, and it's so frustrating when you're not able to post that all-important account of your experiences. I use Blogger which is an online weblog service and is free for the basic version.

If you're in a city for a while (e.g. a few days), don't use mainstream cybercafes. They often have software that restricts your use of the machine. Spend some time searching for a facility that may be off the high street or smaller, but that offers the same deal without the restrictions. The best places I found were not cybercafes at all - they were travel shops that had a few internet-connected PCs. The advantage is that, in these places, the owners are less tech-savvy and you'll have a machine that you can install things on (e.g. software for processing and uploading photos - see below). Plus you won't be restricted because of firewalls etc. (e.g. for FTP).

Photos: I uploaded my photos once every few weeks. I regularly dumped them to CD in a photo store, made a selection, processed each image in Photoshop, created thumbnails and HTML files with Express Thumbnail Creator and uploaded them to my site with WS FTP LE. Photoshop is obviously not free, and I had to find cybercafes that had it pre-installed (wasn't always easy). Express Thumbnail Creator is shareware, and WS FTP LE is free. The best thing would obviously be to have all this stuff on CD before you sit down at the PC.

Be aware that some cybercafes will charge you for upload bandwidth (never very much though).

COMMENT all your photos! It takes time but it's worth it. Express Thumbnail Creator has this feature built in. Nobody really wants to go through pages and pages of unlabelled thumbnails of sunsets and mountains. Also, commenting your photos is a good test for yourself to ensure that you're only putting interesting photos up.

As soon as your photos are up, announce it in your blog and send out a mail to everyone in your address book who may be interested (mail to yourself, BCC everyone you're sending to).

M.

Announced today, Adobe had optimized photoshop for the G5 processor. The details are vague but you can read them on the Press Release. Now I have to say that I love the G5 for everything it is but I'll stay imparitial about it until the first units are in the hands of people who can test it with applications similar to what I run.

You could also use redmon, available at the ghostscript site, and follow the instructions in the online help file on how to set up a RPT1: (or as I like to call it PDF:) printer port, which will automatically prompt for a filename, and converts ps to pdf on the fly, no cygwin neccesary.

For added coolpoints, you could use the Adobe Acrobat Distiller PPDs for the postscript printer that's attached to the PDF: port - this will allow custom "paper" sizes for example.

You will either need the adobe ps driver (winsteng.zip), or use the following oemsetup.ini for windows 2000/xp

--------
[Version]
Signature="$Windows NT$"
Provider=%slashdot%
ClassGUID={4D36E979-E32 5-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Class=Printer
[Manufac turer]
%slashdot%=slashdot
[slashdot]
"Adobe Acrobat Distiller"=ADIST5.PPD

[OEM URLS]

[ADIST5.PPD]
CopyFiles=@ADIST5.PPD,PSCRIPT
Dat aSection=PSCRIPT_DATA
Include=ntprint.inf
Needs= PSCRIPT.OEM, PSCRIPT_DATA

[DestinationDirs]
DefaultDestDir=66000

[SourceDisksNames]
4= %DiskID1%,,,

[SourceDisksFiles]
ADIST5.PPD = 4

[Strings]
DiskID1="ADIST5"
slashdot="slashdot"
--------

Tell all your friends about redmon!! Redmon rules!

For click-monkeys, you can also use pdf995 a commercial distro which installs ghostscript in a hidden away directory (no source! GPL??) and has its own redmon-alike functionality. The PPD used is from an Apple colorwriter (doubt they have permission to distribute it). It also will fire up iexplore to go to its own homepage after each file you print.

Here's the PDF specification, if that's what you mean...

PDFreference.pdf

It's almost 1000 pages, I found it pretty useful.

NachtVorst

I'd love to. Perhaps you could provide a link to a vector drawing package that is as good as Corel Draw?

Try this or perhapsthis. Not so many features, but a lot more quality.

the tricky one is PDF. your only allowed to convert files to PDF's 5 times before you have to pay . . .

Adobe expressing its preference

Would this be from the same benchmark/study that innovated by using minutes containing 100 seconds, among other things? Not to mention the fact that Adobe appear schizophrenic at best about their preferred OS. My guess? They'll "prefer" any operating system that will bring in the greenbacks at a suitable pace.

Anyway. While we could debate the merits of PowerPC vs. x86 till our faces turned blue, I do agree with you on the assesment of the server market. Xserve will be a niche player, but then again, being a niche player on the whole hasn't been too bad for Apple.

Adobe expressing its preference

Would this be from the same benchmark/study that innovated by using minutes containing 100 seconds, among other things? Not to mention the fact that Adobe appear schizophrenic at best about their preferred OS. My guess? They'll "prefer" any operating system that will bring in the greenbacks at a suitable pace.

Anyway. While we could debate the merits of PowerPC vs. x86 till our faces turned blue, I do agree with you on the assesment of the server market. Xserve will be a niche player, but then again, being a niche player on the whole hasn't been too bad for Apple.

According to the Adobe Acrobat website, Acrobat Reader (just renamed Adobe Reader) has been downloaded over 500 million times.

But the $500 price tag for Photoshop makes me a big, big Gimp fan. It does everything I need.

Unless you're a graphics design professional (in which case, $500 is a business expense and can be written off on your taxes, and is a small price to pay to have the industry-standard tool), you probably don't need most of what Photoshop does. However, Photoshop's interface is one of its greatest assets, and you can get that and all the functionality most enthusiasts need in Adobe's Photoshop Elements product. It's $99 and available for Mac and Windows. If you're too lazy to go to the store, you can pay online and download it.

If $99 is still too much for you, then I can't help you.

The man in question, I beleive, is John Warnock. I'd heard he was working with Evans and Sutherland at the time, rather than Xerox, but that was word of mouth...

Mac-on-Linux makes it possible to run Mac OS (including OS X) under Linux/ppc.

I would definitely love to be able to run adobe products on my linux box.

How does Perl's extension interface compare to Python's? How hard is it to plug Perl into another application, using Python as an application extension language? How hard is it to integrate code written in other languages into Perl, and expose complex programming interfaces, data structures, and API's?

For example of a non-trivial interface, let's take the Microsoft Speech API. Expose all of the classes, methods, functions, data structures and enumerated types. How long would it take you to write a Perl interface to that? How many lines of hand written code would it involve? I've used SWIG and Python to do that, and it took about 1500 lines of SWIG declarations and 1500 lines of C++ glue: pretty easy given the complexity of MS SAPI. SWIG writes all the glue code and Python class wrappers, so it's very convenient to use in an object oriented manner from Python.

How about embedding Perl in Adobe Photoshop -- how many lines of hand written code would that take? How about exposing the Photoshop plug-in API, data structures, callbacks and extension suites so they can be conveniently called and hooked into from Perl? What about more complex APIs like Illustrator's incomprehensible interfaces to structured graphics, and AfterEffects constellation of complex interfaces to images, channels, timelines, keyframes, filters, parameters, user interface widgets, etc.

Here are some interesting Python modules and application extensions to compare with whatever Perl modules you can come up with: http://opensource.adobe.com/

This site contains open source projects which are related to Adobe products. The projects are provided under the Adobe Open Source license.

If you have questions about this site or its contents check the help page.

Simulated Partial Specialization for non-compliant C++ compilers. Allows a user to obtain many of the benefits of partial specialization of C++ templates without direct compiler support.

Python action plug-in for Adobe Photoshop. Allows a user to write Photoshop action plug-ins using Python. Has Python interfaces to all the actions APIs.

Python plug-in for Adobe Illustrator. An Illustrator plug-in adapter that allows users to access the C level API from Python

Python plug-in for Adobe After Effects. An After Effects plug-in that allows users to access the C level API from Python.

Python module for Perforce SCM. A C coded Python module that provides access to all the calls in the Perforce source code management system SDK.

-Don

It sure would be nice if Adobe would release an updated version of their SVG plugin. The current one, 3.0, is from November 2001. The Linux version is still beta 1.

Or does anyone know of other ways to render SVG in the browser besides the Adobe plugin?

JP

Is it really possible to spend five days talking about an image format no one has ever used?

BuddyZoo has a nice use for SVG, you may have heard of it somewhere. I don't like the Adobe SVG Viewer but the Apache Software Foundation's Batik project is good for turning SVG into a nice (albiet big) PNG.

java -jar batik-rasterizer.jar FILE.svg

Although you might have to futz around with the svg code generated by to get it to work with Batik. Run it through an XML validator to see what I mean. (There is top level <svg> but two closing </svg> so delete the one that isn't at the end.)

Adobe has a good cheat-sheet of key combinations for special characters on their Type Library page. The quick link is http://www.adobe.com/type/pdfs/characcessmac.pdf

Adobe has a good cheat-sheet of key combinations for special characters on their Type Library page. The quick link is http://www.adobe.com/type/pdfs/characcessmac.pdf

Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Or, in the case of having an extra CPU in the machine....

First, Apple's sales pitch was that it could read PC disks. Later, their sales pitch was that they could run PC code through emulation. After that, there was a time when you could purchase an add-in card for your Max which had.... an Intel chip on it, just so you could run PC code.

(Of course, still later, Adobe realized that just running on an x86 chip in the first place would be better.)

steve

Well, if you can pay for this, then Adobe has an online service which allows you to create PDFs online from a variety of file types. Might help...

Well, if you can pay for this, then Adobe has an online service which allows you to create PDFs online from a variety of file types. Might help...