Shapes Shapes Shapes...

Hi there,
Today I have just something small for you that might be handy in some situations. In JavaFX you could use SVG paths in CSS files to style e.g. a Region. One use case for this could be the arrow in combo box control etc.
My problem was that I needed to convert a JavaFX Path object into a SVG path and so I wrote a little method that did the trick.
Well after I wrote this method I thought it might become handy to have a tool that could convert all available JavaFX Shapes into SVG paths. The available Shapes at the moment are

• Arc
• Circle
• CubicCurve
• Ellipse
• Line
• Path
• Polygon
• Polyline
• QuadCurve
• Rectangle
• SVGPath
• Text

To convert SVGPath into a SVG path doesn't make sense and converting Text into a SVG path is not possible at the moment because there is no way to get the Path from a Shape (which I would love to see in a future version). Means there is no support for SVGPath and Text but for all the other Shapes I created a class named ShapeConverter that contains the following public static methods...

• shapeToSvgString(Shape param)
• shapeToSvgPath(Shape param)
• convertArc(Arc param)
• convertCircle(Circle param)
• convertCubicCurve(CubicCurve param)
• convertEllipse(Ellipse param)
• convertLine(Line param)
• convertPath(Path param)
• convertPolygon(Polygon param)
• convertPolyline(Polyline param)
• convertQuadCurve(QuadCurve param)
• convertRectangle(Rectangle param)

So you could either convert a Shape object to a String like this...

Line line = new Line(10, 10, 50, 50);

String svgString = ShapeConverter.shapeToSvgString(line);

System.out.println(svgString);

M 10 10 L 50 50

or convert a Shape object to a SVGPath object like this...

Line line = new Line(10, 10, 50, 50);

SVGPath svgPath = ShapeConverter.shapeToSvgPath(line);

System.out.println(svgPath.getContent());

M 10 10 L 50 50

or you could directly use the specific method if you know what kind of Shape you would like to convert to a String.

I commited the ShapeConverter class to the JFXtras project so if you are interested in the code, please take a look here.

If you just would like to see the code...no problem...

I'm not sure if this might be useful for someone but I needed it and thought it might be worth sharing it with you...


UPDATE:
It is now possible to convert also Text into SVG paths. I used a little trick to do this. Because Text is a special form of a Shape it's possible to do something like 

Shape.subtract(new Text("Han Solo"), new Rectangle(0, 0)) 

This will return a Shape which is a Path and contains the path of the text. And a Path could be converted into a SVG path :)
That means you could use it to create SVG symbols from characters which might be useful when using a Symbol font.

so have fun and keep coding...