SVG2PNG

Review by Andrew Smith

SG2PNG is a converter from SVG to PNG or Animated PNG. Since I had a lot to do with APNG this page is a review of the program as a converter to APNG.

The program is under development but can already be used to produce neat PNG animations. You can download the latest version from the homepage. You can get the version I reviewed from here. It's a Firefox extension. Note that the extension will ony work in Firefox 3 (you can get an alpha version here).

Overview

This is a screenshot of the program. Don't complain, it's an early beta version. The nice thing about it is that it works :)

SVG2PNG resembles, somewhat, Dolske's APNG Edit. Except that one takes several plain PNG files and makes an animated PNG, while this one takes a single SVG file (SMIL) and makes an APNG.

The buttons in the toolbar are:

- 'Open' to open the SVG
- 'Reload'
- 'Render to PNG'
- 'Save PNG'

The controls on the left are pretty self-explanatory. You can control the size of the resulting APNG, the number of frames per second, and a couple of other APNG parameters.

Usage

It's so simple it's a pleasure to use. You click the open button and choose the SVG. It will show up in the preview area on the left (not animated). Then optionally you click on 'Preview' and it will show in the preview area on the right (animated). Then you click on 'Save' and you have your Animated PNG.

Of course before saving you can change any of the settings. Somehow though the application manages to guess a good size for the resulting APNG file so I don't need to worry about it.

Examples

On the left you have the source SVG files and on the right the Animated PNG files I created using the program. Note you will only be able to see the PNG animation in Firefox 3 (you can get an alpha version here).

SVG	APNG

There are more SVG samples here if you want to play with the extension.

Contact

You can email me (Andrew) using this form or the author of the progarm (Holger) using this form.