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An SVG is all you need

(jon.recoil.org)
258 points sadiq | 3 comments | 11 Dec 25 19:25 UTC | HN request time: 0.762s | source
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amelius ◴[11 Dec 25 23:05 UTC] No.46238590[source]▶
I recently found out that it is surprisingly hard to convert an SVG file that consists of series of line segments into a list of those line segments in Python.

I tried with ChatGPT and Claude but both were not able to find a solution that respects the entire specification, especially transforms.

Initially, my expectation was that there must be a library for this kind of thing, but alas.

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1. nish__ ◴[11 Dec 25 23:13 UTC] No.46238679[source]▶
Can't you do it by hand pretty easily? It's a list of coordinates separated by spaces. For example: "100,100 100,200 200,200 200,100"
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2. amelius ◴[11 Dec 25 23:24 UTC] No.46238783[source]▶
No, the specification is more complicated, for example elements (and sub-elements recursively) can have transforms applied to them.
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3. boothby ◴[11 Dec 25 23:35 UTC] No.46238900[source]▶
Excellent point. Inkscape has (had?) a feature to simplify SVG files, which pushed transformations down the tree. I never needed to use this in an automated process, just the occasional file.