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Comment by byron_fast | Hacker News Reader

It's nice that we've got the most valuable part of Flash: a vector rendering engine. I do miss Flash's editor for these types of content, though.

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> I do miss Flash's editor for these types of content, though.

It's still here! It's now branded Animate CC[1], and (naturally) focuses on other output formats.

[1] http://www.adobe.com/products/animate.html

Right! But is it SVG or only Canvas?

Canvas, WebGL, or "a potentially limitless number of platforms with the new Custom Platform Support SDK" (https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/publish-multiple-plat...)

The product itself can export to SVG (https://helpx.adobe.com/animate/how-to/export-image-svg.html), but I get the impression that's only for individual frames.

Edit: https://blogs.adobe.com/creativecloud/export-svg-animations-... exports SVG animations, but only, it seems, for special types of documents ("From here you simply create a new “Snap.svg Animator” document type and begin creating content s you would normally. Publishing your content then generates a boilerplate HTML file along with all the assets you need, giving you an example of how to embed your animation into a webpage.")

I just spent all day trying to manually wrangle SVG in the browser. I'd be happy with a good static SVG editor to be honest.

Inkscape is OK, but a little rough. Take a look at Affinity Designer. It is very polished and has a feature set approaching Adobe illustrator at a very reasonable price. It's also well supported by the publisher.

I've been using both recently. Affinity Designer has a much, much better interface but I keep finding features and options missing that make it frustrating for coding projects. You can't easily open an SVG file, edit it and quickly save to the same SVG file without going through several clicks and setting options to export ("save" will save in a proprietary format). There isn't a command line interface for exporting either. I can't see a way to edit the SVG XML either (you can do that in Inkscape) which is important when you're wanting to script it later.

For previous projects, I've had workflows where images were extracted from one place, added into existing SVG files and Inkscape was scripted to slice up and export sections into PNG files. I can't see a way to do anything similar with Affinity Designer.

Inkscape is what I always use for editing static SVGs. Not using it enough to become familiar with it myself, the interface is usually intuitive enough for me to guess my way to success.

My biggest gripe with inkscape is that it suffers from some sort of floating point precision error, when you do certain copy/paste/transformation operations it mercilessly outputs more digits of significance than are necessary, which bloats the text and peeves off someone who must obsessively keep their ml clean

And also the output png is sometimes unpredictable. I hate it when what's supposed to be flat-coloured in svg turns out to be this 'pixelated-swirl' in png. I also find minimising operations can reduce this effect.

I would guess it's just outputting the 16 or so (decimal) digits of a IEEE float using one of the round-tripable representations. Not sure what else would be reasonable. Could you round the output with some specialized tool?

Also what does "ml" mean?

Markup Language, I'd guess.

Inkscape?

Great tool, I used it to build image assets a couple years ago for a native android app and now use it for any diagrams I want to look particularly nice.

Experienced Flash developers would rasterize complex vector shapes on the first load to consume less CPU by raw vector rendering, especially animations. So it's still not a Flash replacement.

That’s Canvas+SVG+JS then. Basically.

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