Okay, I just completed another conversion of the map to SVG. I took it from your

Mapboard(2007-03-07-draft)-Editable.pdf

It is available at

http://broggs.org/~mcbeth/Celts/MapboardPlain.svgz

This should be much more maintainable than the last attempt. I really don't want to have to do this many more times, though

It turns out that Illustrator's SVG output sucks rocks, but it is a lot better than my previous starting points. Fixing the font output from Illustrator was easy (thank you so very much for putting the white and black country names in separate layers). The tough bit was that Illustrator dumps loads and loads of useless crap that isn't strictly in the SVG namespace. Practically gave myself carpal tunnel yanking all the stupid foreign objects. I suspect next time, I'll have to learn how to do XML safe search-replace (XSLT?).

Anyway, unless someone notices something horrible, this'll be my starting point for the Celtic Fury game map.

It looks just fine (in Inkscape and Batik, it's slightly miss-rendered in Firefox, but I can live with that). However, it's useless as an editable source, as all text-on-path have been replaced with one manually placed text area per letter...

<cut> (it was some unwarranted snippiness)

Okay, so from memory, we are talking about the river names and "The Great Sahara Desert". Is there anything else that used to be on a path? That should be easily fixable (but I'll have to do it quicky, as I need to get Celtic Fury put together, and don't want this trial of Illustrator on my work laptop to expire). It is nice to be trying to contribute to the core again rather than just GMing.

The only rendering error I'm seeing under Firefox is not aliasing the fonts properly. Perhaps we are running different versions? What exactly are you seeing, and on what version. I have been continually frustrated by how different Firefox's SVG rendering is on the three major platforms (Mac being surprisingly the worst)

From memory: River names, Atlantic ocean, Indian ocean, Sahara dessert.


I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.2 (identified as "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; sv-SE; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070302 Firefox/2.0.0.2". It's an unofficial build (as there is no official x86_64 builds).
Misrenderings include:
Missing "Civilization: The Expansion Project"
Misplaced and missized text on the trade card stacks
Everything that is supposed to be text-on-path has the letters at odd angles.
Big white bar at the top.
Funny looking text in general. I think this is more than just antialiasing, it seems more slanted (more than mere italic), and in general slightly of, as if it was a slightly different font.

All this on a quick look, might be more.

Additionally I took a look at the source code, and it's a mess, though it seams cleanable. If you manually remove xml:space="preserve" and then let inkscape do it's "vacuum defs" it'll get much better. Still lots of work though, especially with the text layers. A quick search (">[A-Za-z]</tspan>") found 713 text areas with one letter each...

Crap! I wondered where all those foreignObjects had disappeared to.

Misrenderings:
Missing "Civilization: The Expansion Project". I had both in separate groups inside the same text element, and it was freaking Firefox out. I suspect the trade cards are suffering from something similar.

I'll look at the trade cards. You know what? Firefox doesn't render letter spacing right. You can see it best on Ceramics, but also look at how the 'O' runs into the 'N' in Civilization. I suspect this may be much of the problem.

The white bar is because the document is actually defined (in Illustrator too) as slightly bigger than the map.

Okay, so Minefield is rendering things better, but they still haven't fixed the letter spacing there either.

As far as the tspans go, I'm not really willing to "fix" those, as that is the manual kerning that Broden did. For example, the title bar is responsible for, some 4 of those, and it does look worse if I try to merge them.

I'll work on the paths tonight probably, as it is important to you

What is important to me is editability, translatability etc. I.e. all text must be replaceable without messing up layout. That mean that what appears to be a single text string must be a single text string, and not XX letters you must change individually, all circles must be circles, not a dozen beizer curves, etc. Preferably all text areas not representing paragraphed text should be anchored at the centre, as opposed to the left, to support translating or changing names to something that hasn't the same length, and still get it to look right. That isn't a requirement though, as I know it's not so in the PDF map either. However, as I recently (for 2007-03-07-draft) fixed all starting area names to be anchored at the middle of the background area (to be able to easily replace them with civilization names) I'm pretty irritated at the fact that they're anchored at the left in the SVG...

And regarding manually kerning, I can accept it in the logo and similar, but not in area names please. It's much more important to be able to change them than it is for them to look perfectly on a per pixel level.

Generally speaking, if you have to choose between things looking right in Firefox, and things being cleanly implemented and easy to edit, choose the later! If exact look is important to someone, he can always export a bitmap from Inkscape.

Is that what the hidden civborder/civname stuff was? I couldn't figure out what it was doing, and it was turned off, so I clipped it out with a bunch of other stuff. I'll put those back.

Text on paths and turning on "align center" for the start territories will be next.
If I think about it enough, merging the tspans should be rather simple, I just have to think about it.

As far as the circles go, the population circles will be easy as they are symbols that are used. The other circles I can think of are the ones on the requirements. I'll get those swapped out.

Are the newer versions of Illustrator any better at SVG output, or do they all suck?

Yes, please do. I used them for Mapboard(2007-03-07-draft)-NoAreaNames.pdf


As long as you identify which ones is supposed to be text-on-path and fix them separately, the rest should be just removing the tspan elements and put the text directly in the text element (will only work single-row align-left, on multirow text you'll need a tspan per row, and on align-centre you'll need to correct the x-value of the text element).


Circles was just an exaple, there are also lots of rectangles with rounded borders, etc. Basicly everything for which their is a basic shape should be one, so one easily can resize them etc. (Don't do this for terrain other than the bottom layer though, as we might want to resze terrain to not be a basic shape any longer).


Reportedly they are slightly better, though I have no personal experience.