Re: [LUG] Custom web application development

2010/1/19 Simon Waters <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Rob Beard wrote:
>
> I wasn't sure if there was anyone on here who did things like this, but
> from what I can tell (from what I have seen of what they do), they would
> require the following:

We do stuff like that at $DAYJOB.

We have proprietary technology to take designs from a well known
graphics editor for Windows, and basically change the text, and keep the
graphics looking pretty.

We've also been playing with using SVG templates with variable content
substituted in, but it isn't quite capable of some of the stuff we'd
like to do (and can do with other technology, and even then IE doesn't
render SVG natively so it is still done server side).

I doubt you'll find much doing exactly what you want with traditional
web technology already, as things like custom fonts only work widely
recently. And the text editors in browsers are pretty naff.

Some folks may have done it with Flash, or proprietary server side code.

> At the moment I've just put the idea to them in an e-mail, nothing may
> come of it as they may decide to stick with MS Office (I'm hoping not),
> but if anyone out there can do this, I'd certainly be interested to know
> what sort of price they'd be looking for (for the initial system and
> then updates if need be) so I can put it to them for consideration.

Unless they are building some sort of self service system I don't see
the motivation to use web technology?

Word is dreadful for this sort of thing, I'd have thought either DTP
software, or a vector graphics tools (Inkscape being a free software one).

Bespoke web application for this sort of thing is going to be expensive
to do. We could probably bend an existing system to do a lot of this
relatively easily but it would place considerable restrictions on design
flexibility compared to something like Inkscape, and would likely need
input for each new design they are wanting to do.

But hey I played for a minute, doing nothing but inserting text, picking
fonts, and dragging them around the layout.

http://www.simon.350.com/for-rob.htm

But I think we'd just make individual graphics with more text, and more
background, to simplify the process of using an existing design.

Problem as Gordon suggests is getting from the above to print quality
PDFs can be fun. We can reasonably easily turf it into pretty graphics
using browser rendering, and presumably tweak the resolution given
enough RAM in the server (I wonder how big a gecko browser can be before
the rendering starts failing?). But sell me on why?

Simon

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