to-cubic

1. About
2. Installation
3. Usage

About

to-cubic transforms the definition of multiple SVG <path>s so that they all use cubic commands and the same number of commands:

Path data animation is only possible when each path data specification within an animation specification has exactly the same list of path data commands as the d attribute.

Current recommandation.

For animation, two d property values can only be interpolated smoothly when the path data strings contain have the same structure, (i.e. exactly the same number and types of path data commands which are in the same order).

Candidate recommandation.

Demo: CodePen.

All command types are supported – m, l, h, v, s, c, q, t, a, z – either relative (lowercase) or absolute (uppercase). The only rule is that a definition should not include a moving command (m or M) that is not the first command.

Installation

  npm i @cdoublev/to-cubic

@cdoublev/to-cubic is built to run in the current version of NodeJS, which means it should be transpiled with your application using its own targets.

Usage

With npx (LTS or current NodeJS version):

npx to-cubic [-r|--round <precision>] <input.(c|m)?js> [output.txt]

The input should be an ECMAScript/CommonJS module whose default/main export is an array containing your path definitions. The result will be forwarded to the standard output, or saved in a file whose path is provided as the second argument.

With import/require:

import toCubic from '@cdoublev/to-cubic'
// Or (CommonJS): const toCubic = require('@cdoublev/to-cubic')

const path = document.getElementById('my-path')
const precision = 4
const [from, to] = toCubic([
    'M0 0h10v10H0z',
    'M5 0A5 5 0 0 0 10 5A5 5 0 0 0 5 10A5 5 0 0 0 0 5A5 5 0 0 0 5 0z',
], 4)

// Animate from square to circle in 2s (using the Web Animation API)
path.animate({ d: [`path('${from}')`, `path('${to}')`] }, 2000)

TODO

• Performances: measure performances of each processing task