SVG Input Elements

Work in progress with the aim of creating a simple editable textarea in SVG.

Examples can be found the example folder.

To set up the development environment you need npm. Then run

npm install

from the command line.

To start the tests and build the project, just run this in the command line:

gulp

How to use

The features documented here are fairly stable and I will try not to change their behaviour (unless it is incorrect).

Create a textarea:

var textarea = SVGIE.textarea(svg, {width: 600});

Createa a textarea with initial text:

var textarea = SVGIE.textarea(svg, {width: 600}, "This is a textarea."); 

Get the width of the textarea:

textarea("width");

Change the width of the textarea:

textarea("width", 600);

Get the value of the textarea:

textarea("val");

Change the value of the textarea:

textarea("val", "Some new text for the textarea.");

Goals and limits for the new version

• Faster rendering!
• No jQuery dependency
• No dependencies at all
• Fewer features (No CSS subset, no lists and no image boxes. Just a textarea.)
• Modern browsers only (no IE9)
• Tests!

Old README

_This readme is outdated. Work is being done on rewriting this library. Only the future will tell if the rewrite is successful or not... _

We are soon ready for a 1.0 version. Help coding a better and more general 2.0 version would be greatly appreciated!

The current state can be considered an alpha or beta version of 1.0. It is feature complete but buggy.

Better documentation will be included in the 1.0 release. For now, use the instructions in Getting Started. A demo (updated 5 June 2012) can be found at josf.se/svg-input-elements/.

This project started out as a sub-project to a master thesis project, Personas in Real Life.

Go to: Features, Requirements, Getting Started, Events, Versions or Development

Features

• Line wrapping
• Word wrapping of long words
• Copy/cut/paste
• Text selection with mouse and keyboard
• Change cursor position with left/right/up/down/home/end etc
• Handles both paragraphs (enter) and manual line breaks (shift+enter)
• Undo/redo
• ...

Requirements

This project requires jQuery (we're using 1.7.2) and the jQuery SVG plugin

Getting Started

You can download the latest examples and test yourself, just change the path "../tools/build.js" to "../jquery.svg.input.js" unless you're on an Apache server with PHP.

Note: In Chrome (and Safari?) the script will fail if you run it from your local file system because of a bug.

Note: The generated files in the root might not always be 100% up to date.

Download jQuery (we've tested on version 1.7.2) and jQuery SVG (tested on version 1.4.5) and include these libraries, and SVG Input Elements:

<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.js" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.svg.js" />
<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.svg.input.js" />

Also include some styles (apologies for bad documentation and coding on this part, SVG Input Elements doesn't behave as expected if certain styles aren't defined. Also, in a futur version all SVG Input Elements classes and IDs will have a special prefix.):

<link rel="stylesheet" href="svg.css" />

Create an inline SVG element with the following attributes (the ID is optional but useful, especially if you have more than one SVG element):

<svg id="svg" version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" unselectable="on" style="-webkit-user-select: none;"></svg>

Make sure that the document is loaded before we start manipulating it, see the jQuery SVG documentation for more information on this:

$(document).ready(function(){
  $('#svg').svg({onLoad: init, settings: {}});  
});

You can now create a textarea, text, list and image using the following code:

function init(svg) {
    var parent = $('#svg')[0]; 
    var x = 10; 
    var y = 10; 
    var settings = {width: '200'}; 

    var textArea = svg.input.textArea(parent, x, y, "text with \nparagraphs", settings);
    var text = svg.input.text(parent, x, y, "text with \nno line \nbreaks", settings);
    var list = svg.input.list(parent, x, y, "list\nof\nitems", settings);
    var image = svg.input.image(parent, x, y, "path/to/image.jpg", settings);
}

the parent parameter is optional. The properties of the settings object corresponds to the attributes of an SVG <g> tag, plus an additional width parameter.

You should now have a working text area!

###Binding Events SVG Input Elements trigger events that you can bind:

textArea.bind("change", function(e, text) {
  console.log("text changed: " + text);
});

textArea.bind("changeSize", function(e, width, height) {
  console.log("dimensions changed: " + width + " x " + height);
});

The changeSize event is useful because the textArea is contained within a group element, and thus it is not possible to stack them in the same way you would stack div elements in HTML.

Events

change: Triggered when the SVG Input Element has changed in some way, i.e. for a textbox it is triggered every time a character is removed or added. Returns one parameter:

• param1: The new text

changeSize: Triggered when the size of the SVG Input Element changes. Returns two parameters:

• param1: The new width
• param2: The new height

Versions

###v1.0 Scheduled early June. This release will provide several text related input elements and should be stable on all major browsers except perhaps for Internet Explorer, which seems to have very poor SVG support even in verion 9.

###v0.3 Released 30 May 2012. Features a list item. It places bullets in front of each new paragraph, styling the textbox like a list. Nothing fancy, but convenient.

###v0.2.2 Released 30 May 2012. Minor enhancements, bugfixes and useable events.

###v0.2.1 Released 16 May 2012. Minor enhancements, bugfixes and support for @import. No longer requires support for the xml:space attribute.

###v0.2 Released 15 May 2012. This release provides bugfixes and several improvements and should also work on Firefox. Additional input elements are postponed to the next release. The documentation is still lacking, contact us if you want help.

###v0.1 Released 9 May 2012. This is a rather limited release which is only properly tested in Chrome/Chromium. It should not be seen as something that is ready to be put in use.

Development

Feel free to join in and develop, if you want to contact us please e-mail Tim (@timbrandin) at [email protected] or Josef (@engelfrost) at [email protected].