I'm trying to make some text fit into a specific width on my SVG, I noticed that the text-length attribute gets me almost there, but it has the problem of stretching the text in case it's too short.
Either spacingAdnGlyphs and spacing are not involved in the behavior I'm looking for, they define how to stretch the text. What I want is to prevent the stretching from happening at all if it's not required in order to make it fit its container. So a short text should not be altered.
<text
length-adjust="spacingAndGlyphs"
text-length="380"
>
Hello
</text>
Could anyone suggest a way to make my text preserve its original aspect ratio if it's not exceeding the width of my container?
Related
I'm struggling to find a way of printing a wide SVG image. This is a common problem so let me explain my specific problem.
The image is wide and so I need to tile it (poster fashion) across about 5 or 6 A4 sheets (actual count not important). My first problem is that the default Print dialog in my Firefox or Chrome browsers, under Windows, do not allow me to scale the image height to fit the page height while also spreading the image width across multiple pages.
Someone else suggested using Inkscape to convert to PDF format as the Print dialog in Acrobat reader has better support for tiling. Well, it does, but Inkscape does not deal with embedded images (e.g. PNG or JPG). Worse still, it generates huge square error markers saying "Linked image not found" all over. These are also preserved in the generated PDF which makes it useless.
There are lots of online tools that claim they can convert SVG to PDF. I tried a handful and none coped with embedded images. They were simply discarded.
So, I'm basically looking for any route to print a wide SVG image onto a horizontal series of pages, and that preserves any embedded PNG/JPG images.
[Edit]
Some of the online results:
zamzar -- images discarded
cloudconvert -- simply used inkscape
convertio -- best of the bunch, but opacity ignored on images
online-convert.com -- images discarded
pdfresizer -- simply used inkscape
freefileconvert -- simply used inkscape
onlineconvertfree -- failed with basic SVG
pdfaid -- massively failed with basic SVG
[Edit 2]
Here are a few lines of code that show one of the embedded internet-based PNG references. This one is designed to provide a faint background image underneath the subsequent SVG shapes. Hence the opacity of 12%.
<defs>
<pattern id="img2" width="50%" height="100%" >
<image xlink:href="https://clipartart.com/images/tree-branch-clipart-png-4.png" x="0" y="0" width="50%" height="100%" />
</pattern>
</defs>
<rect width="100%" height="100%" fill="url(#img2)" fill-opacity="0.12" />
I've had time to experiment with this further (and so wasting printer paper by the shed-load).
1) Inkscape deliberately does not support Internet image references (e.g. http) for "security reasons". As mentioned, it puts a horrible error marker in the view of the loaded SVG and I have found no way to edit it out. Hence, it gets saved in any PDF version.
2) If I download local copies of the images and change their http:// references to equivalent file:/// (yes, 3 slashes) then they are accepted.
3) This allows a PDF copy to be saved, but if any of the images had an opacity (e.g. a background image) then that gets lost and it is full opacity in the PDF. This may be a conversion issue or a PDF limitation -- I do not know.
4) Since I then have local copies of the images, they can be changed to implement any faintness required "at source".
5) The Acrobat Print dialog has a Poster option for tiling the pages of a wide image. Ensuring no 'cut marks' or 'labels' are added, you can set a 'Tile scale' that keeps the height within one page, and it will spread it over as many pages as necessary for the width. On the basis of the scaling, it selects landscape/portrait itself and ignores any selection of your own.
So, problems? Yes, the Acrobat 'Overlap' setting is a mystery, leaving a thin white margin on either one or both of adjoining sheets in the output. I have not been able to correlate the width of this margin, or the appearance on one or both sheets, with this setting.
Via the Preferences button, I can get to the normal printer preferences dialog, where I can request 'Borderless printing'. Rather than fixing the issue, this just makes the correlations even more mysterious.
I would like to generate some diagram style graphics using SVG and use text in the diagrams. My problem is, how to know the size of the text in advance to be able to adjust the rest of the layout accordingly. To make this explicit: I'm not talking about SVG in a browser. I would like to work with fixed units and generate PDF for printing for example. So if I use a 12pt font, it should also be printed as 12pt font.
To have a more concrete example: Lets assume I have the three strings "bla", "blablub" and "blubblablub". I would like to print them in a given 12pt font, determine the string size and enclosing boxes and draw the biggest sized box around all of them. The idea is to have equally sized boxed around all, based on the longest text.
Could somebody give me a hint how to do that or why it is not possible? Searching for this topic, I only get some JavaScript tricks in the browser, which usually involves rendering the text and then re-rendering everything again.
Is there a nice and easy way to to have the functionality of lengthAdjust (together with textLength) for shrinking text if necessary (if too wide) but never attempting to stretch it?
Two possible solutions for a SVG generated through JS come to my mind:
Count characters (or rather grapheme clusters) and based on that (together with some heuristics unless a fixed-width size font is used) determine whether to set textLength or not.
First do it without textLength set and then determine using getBBox() whether the text needs some shrinking in which case textLength will be set.
Both solutions are IMHO quite ugly (and possibly buggy from my recollections of past encounters with getBBox()). Is there maybe some nicer solution I missed?
Have a look at this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/39886640/1925631
Essentially, make a path which spans the exact coordinates where you want to spread your text on a path. Measure this path. Then, measure how many pixels your text requires, with a font-size of 1px (and other desired font-features). Now adjust the font-size to fill your desired percentage of the available path advance width. Adjust start-offset and text-anchor. Now finally calculate your author specified textLength and choose a lengthAdjust value to get exact alignment on low precision / non-conformant renderers.
Finally, if you need to support viewers without text on a path rendering support, you can use a conformant viewer with javascript support to create a backwards compatible/fallback version. Render the content and use the SVG DOM api to fetch the x, y and rotate values for each character/glyph, now create a new SVG DOM representation with those attributes specified. You might need javascript to calculate absolute width and height for the root svg element as well, and a correctly specified viewBox, and cascade/resolve/convert all css selectors/rules/properties to inline attributes. But this way you can get cross-platform, cross-browser/viewer rendering of text, with a single compilation step per immutable source file version.
I've also made a gist to ease the last step, of resolving the css and removing all classNames, while preserving the rendered end-result: https://gist.github.com/msand/4b37d3ce04246f83cb28fdbfe4716ecc
This is for the purpose of a single universal svg + javascript codebase, and web+ios+android software development (based on react + react-native + react-native-svg)
I can use text-align="middle" on a text element to center text. Actually this only works nice for the x-direction. For the y-direction I use the hack of Ian G in question Aligning text in SVG.
But what can I do, if a want to center a text in the y-direction, but want to left-align the text in x-direction?
For example, I have a rect-element and a text-element positioned right of it. The text should be vertically aligned to appear centered in relation to the rect. Therefore I use the text-align="middle" property. But I want to left-align the text in the x-direction (since I want to display it at the right of the rect). That doesn't work, since text-align always applies the both, x and y values.
Actually I am not really happy with the vertical alignment in that way and would prefer something else. But didn't find a better solution yet. (I can't use the dominant-baseline attribute, since I am using Batik, which doesn't support it.) I can't even calculate it myself, since in SVG I have no way to query the ascent/descent/baseline of a font.
The baseline-related attributes, as you have discovered, are not universally supported (yet).
One possible solution is to use a method similar to the old CSS trick for vertical centering.
Set the y coord of the text to the vertical centre of the object you want to center on. Then use dy with an em value to adjust the text verically.
<text x="0" y="100" font-family="Verdana" font-size="20pt" dy="0.35em">Some TEXT</text>
The amount of dy won't be 0.5em as you might think because the visual centre of the font won't be exactly half the em height. It will vary from font to font. But once you find a good dy value for a particular font, it should work for any font-size.
Demo here: http://jsfiddle.net/js88W/1/
Try changing the font-size value to confirm it stays centred.
I would like to take a multiline block of text and display it in SVG. I would like to keep the lines as lines. Is there a proper way to do this?
I am using Inkscape for my base drawing and Batik for my rendering. It seems the two do not agree on how to do this.
Inkscape is creating a structure like this:
<flowRoot
xml:space="preserve"
id="flowRoot3089"
style="font-size:16px;font-style:normal;font-weight:normal;line-height:125%;letter-spacing:0px;word-spacing:0px;fill:#000000;fill-opacity:1;stroke:none;font-family:Sans"
transform="translate(19.71875,334.88681)">
<flowRegion id="flowRegion3091">
<rect id="rect3093" width="50.78125" height="75" x="34.765625" y="155.89932"/>
</flowRegion>
<flowPara id="flowPara3123">Item 1</flowPara>
<flowPara id="flowPara3137">Item 2</flowPara>
<flowPara id="flowPara3139">Item 3</flowPara>
</flowRoot>
However, this is not acceptable to Batik for some reason.
Inkscape sets the SVG version of the document to 1.1 instead of 1.2, but still uses flowing text.
The simple solution for you is to edit your svg document and change the SVG version attribute to 1.2. Inkscape will not change it back to 1.1 and it handles the 1.2 version specifier fine.
Batik will then be happy to provide most functionality, however you'll also run into another Inkscape bug if you mess with pretty much any of the text attributes within the flow root that Inkscape creates. It sets the background color to the selected foreground color for the text, which means if you set the text color to red in Inkscape, when batik renders it, you'll see a red square ... the text is there, but its red too, so not really visible. This an Inkscape bug and is clearly visible in the code for the flowRegion -> rect element.
The solution is to manually edit your flowRect attributes after tweaking them with inkscape.
Batik also seems to do better if you use the standard svg output rather than inkscape svg output.
This is not acceptable since flow* elements are non-standard elements. It comes from an SVG1.2 draft that has never been accepted and it is designed to wrap text in custom shapes. Only Inkscape and some builds of Opera support it. So, don't use it, at least for the moment.
If you don't need text wrapping (and you don't seem to, but I don't understand what you mean by "I would like to keep the lines as lines"), I suggest you use the basic <text/> element.
I'd suggest <text> with <tspan> children. Inkscape can generate that for you quite easily, just don't click and drag an area but instead just click where you want the text and start writing, press return where you want a new line.
Alternatively, foreignObject will allow you to include html:
<svg:foreignObject><html:body><div>text here</html:div></html:body></svg:foreignObject>
Doesn't seem to work in Opera or IE, though.