Print To Mobile continued...
So after that post about Printing to my mobile, I saw a comment about an SVG Printer Driver which was great! (SVG is Scalable Vector Graphics, an XML format) So then I spent some time yesterday morning looking for an SVG Player for my Nokia 6600 and sadly didn't come up with anything. At one point I thought NetFront would support it, so I went and bought ($9.99) the latest version, but no dice. I emailed them and asked what the deal was, and got this reply:
Hi Russ,
unfortunately the current version does not support SVG and there is currently no way for you to enable SVG support.
Our SVG module for NetFront that you might have seen at some event or show is today not available to end users but we promote it towards device makers.
However, we would be happy to hear your opinion on SVG on smart phones.
Kind regards,
Your NetFront support team
My opinion is that we need an SVG viewer! I wonder why Opera doesn't support it either? (I should email Dag, the Opera for S60 product manager and ask him.) It seems a pretty good thing to have since SVG is a 3GPP standard now.
There's also a company called BitFlash that has a S60 player (or so it says on their home page) but it's only available via their $500 SDK. I emailed and asked for a demo version, but I'm not sure.
Okay, so that seems to be a dead end. MobileWhack also picked up the post thought it was a no brainer that I should go buy PDF+ (which I wrote about in my Mobile Office post a while back) and use that. But Rael is on a Mac, and Mac apps by default can print to PDF (I think). Looking around for a PDF Printer Driver for the PC came up with a variety of expensive solutions, but still, the option is there.
SVG would be preferable, I think, so we'll just have to wait until someone gets around to writing the app.
-Russ
Update. So Oldtimer on #mobitopia pointed me at the J2ME SVG Project called Tinyline, which is very cool. It'll allow you to download .svg and .svgz files over the internet and display them locally (SVG-Tiny, not normal SVG's however).
The cool part, and this is the first time I've actually done this in practice - it was all theory before - was that I started up the VsHttpd web server, copied a .svg I had printed on my computer over to the phone to the E:\Web directory (which the VsHttpd serves up) and loaded it into the Java app.
It worked and is a very, very, very cool hack. However, the SVG Print Driver I have obviously produces way more than SVG-Tiny and thus all I saw was a black blob. But still... it was pretty neat.
-Russ