John Smith's Blog

Just been mucking around with SVG and JavaScript, and knocked out this fairly basic animation...

Something that's a tad annoying is that if you include an SVG file via an <img> tag, it doesn't seem to execute any JavaScript that it might contain - as such, I've had to resort to an <iframe> above. Whilst I can understand why an <img> isn't executed, it's mildly annoying - animated GIFs work, after all.

Just in case browser support does change, here's the SVG again, but this time pulled in as an <img>...

Anyway, this is all well and good, but I imagine that >99% of the people who might view this will have no idea of what this is supposed to be. In brief (?), it's a very simplified side-on view of how paper is consumed in a newspaper printing press.

To avoid having to literally "stop the press", each press tower can hold two (or less commonly, three) reels of paper. One of these reels will be "webbed up", and unwinds the reel to feed the paper into the press. Note that these reels can weight between 500kg and two tonnes, with - very approximately - 20 kilometres of paper on them, which takes around 20 minutes to be consumed when a press is running at full tilt. (Bear in mind that I'm referring to the specifications of the presses and reels at a place I used to work, and other print sites are likely to differ considerably.)

As one is about to expire, the other moves into position to take over. There's some clever mechanical/electrical engineering magic involving double sided sticky tape (no joke) and automated cutters, which I'm not going to mention further, as I don't know enough about it to speak with any degree of accuracy. The finished reel drops down into a bin below, for later removal to a waste area, and a new reel takes its place.

The SVG/JS code is pretty hacky, and could do with a lot of improvement; however this was primarily for me to have a proper play with SVG for the first time, rather than to produce something "professional".