Re: on text decoration

Howdy.

For the best examples of what you can do with SMIL, I will have to 
unfortunately direct you to Realnetworks site (which although they are 
desperately attempting to proprietize much of the language with their own 
extensions, their player is likely the only support you will have on the 
majority of machines)...

http://www.realnetworks.com/devzone/howto/contentcreation/smiltips/sample
s/index.html?src=authkit_011600,rlvid8_082300

They have dozens of easy, medium and advanced tutorials for creating SMIL 
presentations. 

-------

To attempt to answer your questions though, I think you are confusing 
several things that people have mentioned.

First:  think of your top-level SMIL file as the equivalent of your html file in 
standard web-development. (or more appropriately, how a dhtml-layers based 
html file is designed).  However, your SMIL file doesn't actually contain any 
of the content itself (where HTML obviously does).

What the SMIL file provides, is the definition of what your playlists, and also 
provides the layout of where each section of your playlist are on screen (or 
within the realplayer-window, as it were in most cases).

For example, you want an interface for your presentation that consists of a 
header, a main content region and a footer. 

Each is defined within your SMIL header with the appropriate top/left, and 
height/width attributes.  This gives us three Named regions that we can then 
direct our content into. I find that using background colors for each region 
helps me actually layout the regions before actually adding the 'content' to 
them.

Note, the layout of these regions doesn't have anything to do (technically) 
with what actual content you throw into them.  You could play video in the 
header region, or whatever...

Now that we have three regions defined (we'll assume that we named them 
'header, main, footer' for simplicity), we can then create playlists for each of 
these regions.

NOTE::If you are creating a multi-item playlist that is targetted to the same Named Region (our 'main' region, for example), you need to use a 
<seq> sequence within your main tags.  For example:

<body>
  <seq>
    <textstream src="http://www.mysite.com/smil/text/intro.rt" region="main" />
    <video src="rtsp://myrealserver.com:554/thevideo_01.rm" region="main" title="video part one"/>
    <video src="rtsp://myrealserver.com:554/thevideo_02.rm" region="main" title="video part two"/>
    <textstream src="http://www.mysite.com/smil/text/outro.rt" region="main" fill="freeze"/>
  </seq>
</body>

This will play through the list of items in the order that they are listed, that is, the intro.rt (which is a mini-playlist, essentially too), then the two 
videos back-to-back and then finally an outro realtext clip (which can be a whole playlist of credits or whatever you want).  The final clip freezes 
when it's finished, so you don't get a blank screen, or worse the real logo.  ;]

As far as formatting a chunk of realtext, you use normal font tags like old-school html (pre-css) like this.  

This is the entire contents of the 'intro.rt' file linked above.  Note that this real text file lasts 60 seconds and will change the contents every 15 
seconds.  You can use the same format for rotating banners regularly, changing the text alongside a video and so on.

<window 
	type="generic" 
	duration="0:60"
	bgcolor="#444444"
	underline_hyperlinks="true"
	link="white"
	width="244" 
	height="60">

<time begin="0:00" />
<clear/><font size="2" face="arial" color="black"><b>Title One</b></font><br/><font size="1" face="arial" color="white">welcome to the 
realtext section of this presentation...this plays at the beginning of the presentation</font><br/>

<time begin="0:15" />
<clear/><font size="2" face="arial" color="black"><b>Title Two</b></font><br/><font size="1" face="arial" color="white">This plays at the 15 
second marker of the presentation.</font> <br/>

<time begin="0:30" />
<clear/><font size="2" face="arial" color="black"><b>Title Three</b></font><br/><font size="1" face="arial" color="white">You can use these 
realtext timer-based clips to provide additional info for the presentations while they play or to create a credits-for videos or whatever you can think 
of.</font><br/>

<time begin="0:45" />
<clear/><font size="2" face="arial" color="black"><b>Title Four</b></font><br/><font size="1" face="arial" color="white">Blar de Blar</font> 
<br/>
<br/>

</font>

</window>

Please NOTE: One thing that screws people up (at least the production team I'm teaching SMIL to) is the width and height attributes within both 
the smil file and the realtext/pix files themselves.  

You should set them both to the same size, especially if you are using the fit="fill" tag within the regions, like this:

		<layout>
			<region id="main" left="2" top="2" height="240" width="320" fit="fill" background-color="black" z-index="2"  />
		</layout>

If you have different sizes in your realtext file as your main SMIL file, the text will be stretched all strange.  This can also be used to your 
advantage to 'squash or stretch' text in strange ways.

-----

I've written enough that I might have to keep this as a tutorial of my own, but that's a run down of what is required.

Real Networks has a realproduction guide as well that you might want to download and they even have a realtext creator program for buliding 
yoru own text presentations.

HotDog has a SMIL composer program that they offer for free, but I found that it wouldn't load any of my previous smil files and crashed alot.  I 
can dig up a URL if you want.

Later

Mike Wuetherick
Technical Director
www.chiselmedia.com


On 11 Jan 2001, at 15:27, Y. Matsui wrote:

> Philipp and Andrew,
> 
> Thank you very much for answering to my question.
> 
> Philipp Hoschka wrote:
> > Unfortunately, that isn't possible. Text formatting is part of
> > each individual text media object, and needs to be specified 
> > there. With a HTML text object, you could share a single stylesheet
> > between the different text objects (inlcude by reference), which 
> > would diminish the workload here. That won't work with Real-text,
> > though.
> 
> My question in that case is that how do you handle it if
> an html text contains more than the characters, such as images, 
> form buttons, wave data, etc ?   Is it allowed to skip them ?
> Or should I display a whole html page in a specified region ?
> Please forgive my ignorance.
> 
> AndrewWatt2001@aol.com wrote:
> > I certainly don't qualify as a SMIL expert. However, I suggest you take a 
> > look at the text capabilities of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). You could 
> > certainly do in SVG the kind of things you mention. SVG has many links with 
> > SMIL Animation.
> > 
> > Despite its name, SVG has significant text capabilities which build in the 
> > kind of CSS properties which you mention.
> > 
> > Take a look at 
> > 
> > http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Overview.htm8
> > 
> > Some useful SVG links are to be found on
> > 
> > http://homepages.strath.ac.uk/~bdu99198/xml/svg/links.html
> > 
> > There is an active SVG developers discussion mailing list at
> > 
> > http://www.egroups.com/group/svg-developers
> > 
> > There are many more online resources but those should help you get started.
> > 
> > You could do something like what you mention with the following SVG code:
> > 
> > <?xml version='1.0'?>
> > 
> > <!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 20000303 Stylable//EN"
> > "http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/03/WD-SVG-20000303/DTD/svg-20000303-stylable.dtd">
> > 
> > <svg width="500" height="500">
> > 
> > <rect x="100" y="100" width="300" height="100" style="stroke-width:3; 
> > stroke:red; fill:none;"/>
> > 
> > <text style="font-family:courier, serif; color:black;font-size:36;" x="105" 
> > y="130">
> > Your text goes here.
> > </text>
> > 
> > </svg>
> > 
> > Take a look at Section 10 of the SVG Candidate Recommendation for information 
> > on text handling.
> > 
> > To view the simple code above you would need the Adobe SVG Viewer (version 
> > 1.0 which is compatible with the March 2000 draft) available at 
> > http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/main.html
> > 
> > I hope that helps.
> 
> Yes, thank you very much for providing me many links.
> It helps me to understand how to use svg.  I didn't know it
> is possible to do it by svg.  I think this is a straightforward way.
> 
> Best regards,
> Yoshinori Matsui
> Panasonic/Matsushita
> 
> 
>

Received on Friday, 12 January 2001 16:49:04 UTC