[Blindmath] An update to SVGToSIG

Wed Dec 14 13:59:31 UTC 2011

Hi Mark, Amanda, and other interested parties,

Amanda was correct in her assessment of the color problem (no surprise to
me, <grin>).

The difference in the response of her program to the colors had to do with
the use of the colors and was not caused by the colors themselves.

The red color was used for the outline of the star. Apparently she converts
colored shape outlines to black outlines and embosses them, regardless of
the color.

The yellow and blue colors were used as fill colors. The blue color was
used to fill the star and the yellow color was used to fill the circle
surrounding the star. As she mentioned earlier, her program ignores all
fill colors other than black fill. Those colors were ignored and the fill
areas embossed as white.

I opened your sig file in QuickTac. The star and the circle look very good.
However, there is a problem with the text. I'm wondering if you saw that
problem in the embossed output or if this is simply a QuickTac issue.

The drawing has the following title at the top[, consisting of letters with
a black outline and red fill:

"A Star by Mark Senk"

Letters must be quite large to be legible when embossed on an embosser with
only 12 dots per inch. As Amanda mentioned in one of her earlier posts, she
forces the text to be a certain size or larger to make certain that it is
legible. The text showing in QuickTac is somewhat larger than the text in
your original SVG drawing, and this caused "enk" to be lost on the right
side of the drawing in Quicktac. That is no surprise. QuickTac is limited
to 101 dots horizontally. Increasing the size of the letters caused the
text to extend beyond that limit on the right side of the drawing.

The problem is that although the first four characters "A St" look very
good, the bottom half of every letter following the first four is missing,
except for the "y". Even the "y" has a problem. The top looks OK. The
bottom three dots (on two rows of dots) on the curly descender look OK, but
there are some missing dots in between.

I can't tell for sure, but it looks like the missing portion consists of
three dots in the vertical dimension. If so, this could indicate that there
is a partial row of Braille characters missing.

Hex characters appear to be in those locations in the sig file, so they may
not be being properly interpreted by QuickTac.

When displayed in Notepad, the characters that make up the text are as
shown below. Perhaps Amanda can use this information to analyze the problem
(if there really is a problem). I believe that the "I on the bottom row of
characters represents the descender on the lower-case "y".

             ;   ,32,      "2      42 71    "2   91
             LL  @5 W1"5"81 R5"241 _:;? "5"81L6  E'
            #MY' ;-B_'{Y-V  <> :B  #/S#'{Y-V,P8  8'
                              "I

Dick Baldwin

On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 3:35 PM, Amanda Lacy <lacy925 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I believe it has to do with my program. With the shapes themselves, if
> they are anything other than white they are drawn. However, only black fill
> is drawn.
>
> Mark, would it help if I did the same with the fill as the shapes? At this
> point you will not be able to distinguish the red lines from the blue and
> yello fill. It will just look like a filled shape. I plan to implement at
> least a very limited grayscale in a later version.
>
> Amanda
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Richard Baldwin" <
> baldwin at dickbaldwin.com>
> To: "Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics" <
> blindmath at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, December 13, 2011 3:28 PM
> Subject: Re: [Blindmath] An update to SVGToSIG
>
>
>  Hi Mark,
>>
>> I'm curious as to why the different colors were treated differently. It
>> probably has something to do with the different optional ways to represent
>> colors in SVG.
>>
>> Can you send the SVG file and let me take a look at it?
>>
>> Thanks,
>> Dick Baldwin
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 8:09 AM, Senk, Mark J. (CDC/NIOSH/NPPTL) <
>> zia7 at cdc.gov> wrote:
>>
>>  I was successful in converting a svg file to the sig format and embossing
>>> it.  The blue and yellow fill colors did not emboss, but red lines came
>>> out
>>> fine.
>>> Thanks to Amanda for her efforts with this program which works well with
>>> the SVG Draw program.
>>>
>>> Mark Senk
>>> Follow twitter.com/marksenk
>>>
>>> Amanda writes:
>>>
>>>
>>> For anyone interested, my converter is still at
>>> http://nonvisualdevelopment.**org/content/svgtosig-amanda-**
>>> lacy-allows-owners-non-tiger-**embossers-emboss-svg-files<http://nonvisualdevelopment.org/content/svgtosig-amanda-lacy-allows-owners-non-tiger-embossers-emboss-svg-files>
>>> I have added the ability to handle matrix transforms. This is because in
>>> some SVG files, instead of transforms which explicitly say rotate,
>>> translate, etc. there is just one called matrix which contains 6 numbers.
>>> This one list of numbers can cause some or all of the transforms I've
>>> listed. Some of the files for my game math course will contain these
>>> matrix
>>> transforms, so I've implemented this change early.
>>>
>>> Again, feedback is appreciated.
>>>
>>> Amanda
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>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Richard G. Baldwin (Dick Baldwin)
>> Home of Baldwin's on-line Java Tutorials
>> http://www.DickBaldwin.com
>>
>> Professor of Computer Information Technology
>> Austin Community College
>> (512) 223-4758
>> mailto:Baldwin at DickBaldwin.com
>> http://www.austincc.edu/**baldwin/ <http://www.austincc.edu/baldwin/>
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>
>
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-- 
Richard G. Baldwin (Dick Baldwin)
Home of Baldwin's on-line Java Tutorials
http://www.DickBaldwin.com

Professor of Computer Information Technology
Austin Community College
(512) 223-4758
mailto:Baldwin at DickBaldwin.com
http://www.austincc.edu/baldwin/