SMIL and Realtext

You have already seen an overview of G2/SMIL technology, URls for all the tools you’ll need and a detailed G2/SMIL Tutorial if you have been following our series of articles on SMIL/G2, The first tutorial covered the SMIL language and RealPix and enabled you to get started creating your own SMIL presentations if you were able to follow through. We’ll cover Real Text, and show you how to use it along with RealPix in your SMIL presentations. In this tutorial. we consulted RealNetworks RealText Creation Guide To get started we used the Real Text Tags Reference (Real Networks also has a Real Text Tag Summary which is convenient once you are familiar with the tags) For reference I created another SMIL presentation, this time using RealText and RealPix For this tutorial My tutorial utilizes a few mind-bending images by Jim Mannix, some mood-expanding guitar licks by David Fiedler, and SMIL coding by myself. is called The Mind’s Garden,SMIL is a derivative, or “flavor” of XML. As you may recall, It carries with it the rules of XML, and a few of its own as well For instance all tags must have both beginnings and endings. like XML, if you’ve been using HTML You are already familiar with a similar syntax Examples include <B>bold</B> and <I>italic</I> tags as the break tag: <BR />. The SMIL language requires you to also use endings for empty elements, the proceeding tag would actually be: <br />.<font color=”blue”>The font’s color attribute is enclosedin double quotes</font>

So lets get started! Assuming you’ve already prepared your images using JPEGTRAN, created a RealPix file pointing to your images, and have encoded your audio track(s) using the RealEncoder, we can move on to the actual RealText file. If you haven’t accomplished the preceding steps, you may want to review our first G2/SMIL tutorial.