I am coordinating Gill, which is the Gnome Illustration app. Gill will eventually support all of SVG (the World Wide Web Consortium's proposed Scalable Vector Graphics standard).
Currently, it supports enough SVG to display a few test files. It does include most of the PostScript bezier imaging model, including stroking and filling, line cap style, line join style, and other goodies. The tiger above was translated from the tiger.ps file included in GhostScript (which was originally created in Adobe Illustrator). Here's the resulting tiger.svg file.
The tiger above takes about 1.5 seconds to render on a P2 233, including application startup and loading the file.
30 Dec 1999: An interim report on the status of Gill. This page has been quiet (I've been busy with other stuff), but there's been quite a bit going on behind the scenes.
26 Jul 1999: Gill now has some support for the <text> element. We still need to fight with the font specification mess and add more refinements like ligatures and kerning, but it's a good start. Here's a screenshot.
21 Jul 1999: Take a look at the CSIRO SVG viewer. This package uses the Java 2D renderer, and has some very cool rendering capabilities.
20 Jul 1999: Gill now supports images, using the gdk-pixbuf image loading library. Full PNG-alpha is supported, as well as JPEG, GIF, and TIFF. The URL link code is still not finished, but it will load images in the current directory.
7 Jul 1999: Development versions of the GraphViz toolkit have SVG export capabilities. These SVG files work with Gill. Here's an example SVG file and resulting gif. In addition, GraphViz is being released under a new, fairly unrestrictive license. Very good news for people who work with graphs!
21 Jun 1999: Gill now supports the fill-opacity and stroke-opacity parameters, allowing alpha-transparent vector objects. The example below is specified as three circles (SVG source: opacity.xml).
Gill has dependencies on:
- Gnome
- Gdome (the Gnome World DOMination framework), used as the interface to bring XML files into Gill.
- The Gnome Canvas, which it uses as the rendering platform.
- libart, which does the actual antialiased rendering for the Canvas.
- gdk-pixbuf, for loading images.
- gnome-xml
The source code of Gill is in Gnome CVS (including Bonsai and LXR views).
Gill is named in honor of type designer, artist, and stonecutter Eric Gill. Eric Gill's most well-known typeface is Gill Sans, although Perpetua and Joanna are also very beautiful designs.
The SVG draft can be found on the W3C web pages. I have also prepared an entertaining and inaccurate roadmap of the various interlocking standards needed for a full SVG implementation.
You might be interested in reading the archives of W3C's SVG mailing list.
I have written an essay on problems with SVG's current font model.
The lion above was rendered using an early prototype of Gill. I found the SVG source at Black Dirt's web page.
