What I’d like to be able to do is draw / animate in Synfig and produce a series of files still in a vector based format, so before any rasterisation is done. Is this even possible? It would be very useful for creating laser shows!
You’re asking for a sif->SVG or whatever other vector format. That has not been written yet.
It can be writen in two ways:
- From the synfig code itself creating a export module.
- Using an external application that parses the sif file and convert it to any other format.
It is not probably that, in a short time, the case 1) were done. We have so few developers and thery are concentrated on mature the program instead of that kind of stuff.
Maybe someone can do the case 2) just reading the sif format and modifying it to produce another vector file. Sif is a htlm format so it is not so difficult to read.
-G
What genete meant to say was: It will be able to if you work on it!
What genete also meant to say was: an XML format.
Instead of “a htlm format”, but now I may be a bit pedantic… 
G.
Yeah! I was not sure about it!
-G
Thanks for that, interesting to know that it is in theory possible. I’m afraid my C++ isn’t up to much these days (I haven’t used it in about 7 years - too much Java) so I don’t think I can easily pursue option 1.
Having seen that the file format is compressed XML, I can see that I could write an external converter, but it would have to duplicate functionality that’s already in Synfig to handle the animation.
Hmm, have to think about this. Are there any docs that describe the structure of the app itself?
The rendering engine, object model and file loader are in libsynfig, there aren’t any docs on that other than the code itself and the doxygen documentation generated from it:
Docs for ETL, a template library used by synfig are here: