Re: [school-discuss] Poor Man's (teacher, student) Flash?

[Dominique Broeglin <broeglin@essi.fr>]

On Tue, 2002-02-12 at 16:18, Les Richardson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to teach my students something about vector based graphic
> formats, but can't afford a class set of Flash. 
> 
> Are there any low cost/ no cost solutions that would allow flash creation,
> etc. It doesn't have to be user friendly, etc. just functional. If not
> Flash, then what about SVG?
> 
> Any ideas, anyone?
> 

	About SVG you can edit it in Emacs (or vi ;-) and visualize it with two
tools (that I know of and are reasonably advanced):
	- Batik (Apache project: xml.apache.org) that is a java based viewer.
But currently it can only (but with high quality) display static SVG
(nothing moves in the image).
	- SVGViewer plugin (From adobe, exists for Linux and Windows). Wich is
just a bit less good in rendering than Batik, but implements almost the
full SVG spec.
	
	To move things in SVG you can either use a SMIL like language in the
SVG document or use JavaScript. For exemple, on the site of Adobe I
recall a little demo that displayed Lissajout curves in an SVG image and
used HTML text fields to modify the Lissajout parameters. The curve,
moved and was dynamicaly changed by the javascript. They have much
better demos now, but this one seemed very interesting in a learning
context.

	I do not know of any tool that can produce dynamic SVG. Maybe
Macromedia or Adobe have one ? But for static content (or content that
will later be animated by javascript) you have a lot of tools that have
SVG exportation: Sketch, StarOffice60, Illustrator, Dia, etc...

	Hope this helps,
	Dom

> Les Richardson
> H. Hardcastle School
> Edam, Sk. Canada
>