u/PlasmaChroma

I'm curious what devs are doing to get over the pain of dealing with SVGs, primarily related to using the components layer and the Text -> Path stuff in the established SVG pipeline.

Initially if you read the tutorial, it looks like a waterfall design, you build your panel, generate the boilerplate code (once!?) and then proceed. But the reality is very few people write code like that -- waterfall is dead, I expect to be able to iterate on this in any direction at any moment.

At first, what I did was work with two label groups, I duplicated the actual text one to do the path conversions each time I saved, it's a bit of a pain but gives the flexibility to edit the text fields going forward.

And for the components layer, I ended up going with an SVG lookup helper that could dynamically locate anchor points at runtime -- and when that got too slow built a utility to build a static coordinate cache.

What I'm trying to transition to is a script converter that splits the text layer, calls inkscape with command line parameters to run the conversion, and then I'm doing my background panel and text rendering separate with 2 svg files. It's slightly more complex now because I'm adding nanovg effects in the middle of this layer cake, but the basic architecture stands. Also it brings up some weird render detail issues when the panels are not merged (because I am putting the text into a framebuffer cache to not continuously waste UI time). I had attempted more quality via some text oversampling at 2x render size which caused some problems with UI scale, but I've hacked around that problem by only doing the over-sample below 200% UI scale.

Anyway, what I'm curious about is have any other devs come up with custom solutions here or are you just kinda dealing with this situation as is? Maybe there's some space here for a shared helper to improve the experience. It just seems to me like the developer model here has stagnated from where software has gone in general.