Hi,
1) I agree that the nesting/drawing order can be an unexpected complication for people who are learning to make SVGs that will work well in videoscribe.
2) To avoid confusion I can simply not use nesting. If I want to draw A B C, I just arrange the layers like this without nesting (For any other readers who may be unfamiliar with SVG drawing order in videoscribe, they draw from the bottom up):
layer C
layer B
layer A
2) I think that the current system has an important benefit. If I want to draw A and B and then draw C behind/under A and B, I can do it using nesting.
Layer B
Layer A
nested layer
Layer C
I think your suggestion would eliminate that possibility and each layer being drawn would have to be on top of previously drawn layers. I might be mistaken about that or maybe I misunderstood your suggestion.
3) To help clarify the way videoscribe reads SVG images, the SVG tips on the Instant Answers page (which might get more traffic if it were called Official FAQ and Tutorials) could be improved with a number of diagrams of simple and more complexly layered SVG files. Below is an example indicating the drawing order with red numbers although much clearer examples could be made:
4) (I think ) Inkscape users don't have the ability to view and arrange layers and nested layers in a convenient way, so much of this discussion may not apply for them.
Well, that's my 2 cents anyway,
-Mike (videoscribe user)
Hi Allen,
I'm one of the in-house illustrators here at Sparkol. Mikes advice is correct (as usual, we really appreciate your help Mike), and once you get used to the way VideoScribe parses an SVG the workflow is very straight forward. If you do create a shape or end up with a group of nested sub-layers, simply highlight them and drag them out to the master tier of your document layers, 3 second job & your problem's solved!
I understand it’s not the most intuitive working practice for people unfamiliar with Illustrator, but we’re working very hard on producing training material to walk people through the process.
Again, apologies if it’s been a frustrating process, if you get stuck again there’s this fantastic tutorial on Youtube that covers making SVGs for VideoScribe using Adobe Illustrator. Keep an eye on our blog/ social media for news on future tutorials and remember that you can always contact our support team if you have any technical questions related to VideoScribe.
-Ben
Hi Allen,
Sorry about that. I thought you just wanted them in the same positions relative to each other. To also keep the same position on the canvas, here are the correct shortcuts:
1) CTRL+F will paste all selected paths into the same exact position in the topmost available layer.
or
2) CTRL+B will paste them into the exact same position in the bottom available layer.
or
3) in adobe illustrator CS5 and newer I think you can use
SHIFT+CTRL+V ("paste in place") which presumable pastes into the currently selected layer. but I don't have CS5 so i can't test it.
(These will work after you use CTRL+X or CTRL+C)
Their positions relative to each other and relative to the canvas will be preserved.
Be sure that you select complete paths and don't miss any anchor points.
If
there are already paths in the layer to which you are pasting, they
will remain there as well. If you want them to have their own layer, be
sure to create a new empty layer for them and place it at the (top or
bottom) appropriate location.
Mike (videoscribe user)
//Allen
Allen Holub
Don't know if this is a bug or a feature.
At present, you're effectively doing a depth-last traversal of the "layer" tree. For example, given
top-layer
A
nested-layer
further-nested
B
nested-layer2
C
You'd draw the vectors in the order A C B. It makes more sense to me to do a standard pre-order traversal (yielding A B C). That way you could guarantee that if any top-level layer preceded any other top-level layer, that all vectors in the first layer would be rendered before any elements in the second layer. You don't have that guarantee, now, which makes for a lot of seemingly random ordering in the way vectors are rendered.