30th anniversary of Star Wars

Hi.

Why is Star Wars related to SVG? Well, remember this text that runs in
at the start of every Star Wars movie? I found myself wanting to display
text that had quite this spatial effect by applying transformations on a
<text> element. To cut it short, it is not possible to do so just by
scaling and skewing.

Then I thought, perhaps there is a filter for these transformations.
Nada. Therefore I'm writing this mail.

The thought is:

* you have a bounding box around an area
* you want to distort it in some way, e.g., having it displayed like a
trapezium, as it is the case in the Star Wars entering scenes.
* Two ways:
  + A generic: You can have an arbitrary path, where you map your
bounding box onto
  + A simpler: You can shift just the corner points of the bounding box.
This is not suitable for "wavelike" distortion or similar, but it should
be much simpler to implement and is sufficient for sterical distortions.
I guess, though I'm not that fit in geometry, that this could be made by
generalizing the transformation matrix to include the "z" line as well

OK, I don't want to have a "third dimension" in SVG (yet), but I guess
transformations of the bounding box like this are quite often to happen
to design people. E.g., both Photoshop and GIMP offer the possibility
not only to rotate and skew a layer but also to "perspectively
transform" it, which is exactly what I'm searching for (actually, it's
the implementation of the second way I mentioned above). In Inkscape I'd
have to transform the text to paths and then try to get it manually
somehow in shape.

Has this matter eventually been discussed for SVG? Were there any ideas
so far, if and how something like this could be included in SVG?

Best Regards
Manuel

Received on Thursday, 24 May 2007 12:49:57 UTC