Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cymen | Hacker News Reader

But it is now end of life. The people behind it went on to Snap.svg[1]. Raphaël was great for VML fallback but now that is no longer needed. It is interesting to see just how many people Adobe has hired that worked on SVG (and projects around it like Raphaël). When I was at Teespring, we used Raphaël and some plugins in the web-based design editor before we wrote our own equivalent (without VML support).

The huge pain point in SVG is fonts. Native SVG fonts died. Trying to do exact pixel-perfect layout in SVG for text is now very difficult. See trying to measure the width of a string in a given font.

http://snapsvg.io/

View on HN

by "people" you mean Dmitry, who was hired by Adobe and subsequently wrote Snap.svg (perhaps with others, though he seems to be the primary maintainer of both libs)

I didn't name names because I didn't recall who did what. But when we were looking for people with SVG experience, I went down the contributor list to both projects and something like the top 10 were all now at Adobe. This is my recollection from over a year ago so I may have some details slightly wrong.

I think the more interesting aspect is that Adobe hires so many developers with vector graphics experience that it is harder to find them in the SF Bay Area (from the talent pool who is interested/willing to work at a startup). Obviously, this is conjecture.

But definitely a huge thanks to Dmitry for his work and for sharing it.

I was involved early with SVG. I was the Javascript test engineer at Adobe for their plugin, and I sat in on some of the working group meetings. When I left I found the marketing department had been raiding my tests for marketing content, so I contracted back to them and built a couple cool demos for adobe.com/svg.

Years later I was interviewing and my interviewer asked me a lot of questions about one example in particular. It turns out he had run across an example and it was exactly what they wanted for their project, but they didn't understand the math. He had tried to find me with no luck, going so far as to call Adobe and find my coordinator who refused to give out my name.

I opened the sample for him (it was still up), clicked on View Source and pointed to the first line that said "Author: [My fairly unique name]". His response was "DAMN IT! It was that easy?!?!?!"

love stories like that

Reply on news.ycombinator.com