README.rdoc

Rasem¶ ↑

rasem is a pure ruby gem that allows you to describe your SVG images in ruby code.

Why Rasem¶ ↑

• Have you ever wanted to visualize some data in a nice image?

• Do you want to draw a complex image that is easier to describe using a code?

• Would you like to power your HTML 5 site with nicely drawn SVG images?

• Do you need to generate nice images from your ruby code?

• Did you feed up with using DIVs and Javascript to draw simple graphs?

• Is your server overwhelmed with sending PNG images that can be described in a few bytes using SVG?

Rasem allows you to generate SVG images that can be easily exported to other formats and embed in an HTML 5 page.

Features¶ ↑

• Draw basic elements: line, rectangle, rouned rectangle, circle, ellipse, polygon and polyline.

• Use SVG styles such as stroke-width, opacity and fill.

• Create SVG groups for better editing in SVG editors.

Coming features:

• Include all SVG standard elements such as gradients, filters and paths

• Create default rake and thor tasks to convert your .rasem files to .svg.

• Embed other images in your SVG image

• Output to more formats such as PNG.

Rasem is still in alpha release. Please report your bugs so that we can work on it. You are welcome to contribute to the project by adding more features and fixing bugs. The end goal of the project is to fully support SVG standard and make it easy to use.

Installation¶ ↑

gem install rasem

Usage¶ ↑

There are two main methods to generate images with Rasem.

Command line¶ ↑

Create a file with extension .rasem. Here is a sample file test.rasem

set_width 100
set_height 100
circle 20, 20, 5
circle 50, 50, 5
line 20, 20, 50, 50

Save this file and execute the command

rasem test.rasem

A file test.svg will be generated.

Ruby code¶ ↑

You can generate the image from your ruby code. This has several uses such as sending the image on the fly from a Rails application.

Here is a simple example

require 'rasem'
img = Rasem::SVGImage.new(100,100) do
  circle 20, 20, 5
  circle 50, 50, 5
  line 20, 20, 50, 50
end

puts img.output

img.output is the SVG code generated for this images.

More Examples¶ ↑

The following examples are for .rasem files. These are actually ruby scripts that are executed to generate the image. So, you can write arbitrary ruby code in .rasem files as you will see.

simple_graph.rasem

nodes = [[10,10], [20,20], [10,20]]
radius = 3
with_style :fill=>"white", :stroke=>"black" do
  for node in nodes
    circle node.first, node.last, radius
  end
end

line nodes[0].first, nodes[0].last, nodes[1].first, nodes[1].last,
  :stroke=>"blue"

Here is a more sophisticated example.

tictactoe.rasem

set_width 150
set_height 150
board = [['x', 'o', 'x'],
         ['o', '-', 'o'],
         ['x', 'o', 'x']]
def draw_x(x,y)
  group :stroke=>"red" do
    line x-20, y-20, x+20, y+20
    line x-20, y+20, x+20, y-20
  end
end

def draw_o(x,y)
  circle x, y, 20, :stroke=>"blue", :fill=>"white"
end

group :stroke=>"black" do  
  rectangle 0, 0, 150, 150, :stroke_width=>2, :fill=>"white"
  line 50, 0, 50, 150
  line 100, 0, 100, 150
  line 0, 50, 150, 50
  line 0, 100, 150, 100
end

board.each_with_index do |row, row_index|
  row.each_with_index do |cell, column_index|
    if cell == "x"
      draw_x row_index * 50 + 25, column_index * 50 + 25
    elsif cell == "o"
      draw_o row_index * 50 + 25, column_index * 50 + 25
    end
  end
end

Here are some examples that show how you can generate images from your ruby code.

You can generate SVG and store it to file

img = Rasem::SVGImage.new(100, 100)
img.line(0, 0, 100, 100)
img.close

File.open("test.svg", w") do |f|
  f << img.output
end

You can use pass a block to SVGImage.new to make things more compact

img = Rasem::SVGImage.new(100, 100) do
  line(0, 0, 100, 100)
end
# Image is closed automatically
# Write to file

You can make your code even more compact by passing the file as a last argument to SVGImage.new

File.open("test.svg", "w") do |f|
  Rasem::SVGImage.new(100, 100, f) do |f|
    line(0, 0, 100, 100)
  end
end

The previous example has another advantage. It does not need to buffer the whole image to memory before writing to file. Rasem is smart enough to detect that the output can be passed directly to the file, hence, saving unnecessary memory buffers.

Contributing to rasem¶ ↑

• Check out the latest master to make sure the feature hasn’t been implemented or the bug hasn’t been fixed yet

• Check out the issue tracker to make sure someone already hasn’t requested it and/or contributed it

• Fork the project

• Start a feature/bugfix branch

• Commit and push until you are happy with your contribution

• Make sure to add tests for it. This is important so I don’t break it in a future version unintentionally.

• Please try not to mess with the Rakefile, version, or history. If you want to have your own version, or is otherwise necessary, that is fine, but please isolate to its own commit so I can cherry-pick around it.

Copyright¶ ↑

Copyright © 2011 Ahmed Eldawy. See LICENSE.txt for further details.