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Realtext and SMIL
By Scott Clark
If you've been following our series of articles on SMIL/G2, you've already seen an overview of G2/SMIL technology, URLs for all the tools you'll need, and a detailed G2/SMIL Tutorial. The first tutorial covered RealPix and the SMIL language, and if you were able to follow through, enabled you to get started creating your own SMIL presentations. In this tutorial, we'll cover RealText, and show you how to use it along with RealPix in your SMIL presentations.
To get started, we consulted RealNetworks RealText Creation Guide. For reference, we used the RealText Tags Reference (RealNetworks also has a RealText Tag Summary which is convenient once you are familiar with the tags).
For this tutorial, I created another SMIL presentation, this time using RealText and RealPix. My tutorial example is called The Mind's Garden, and utilizes a few mind-bending images by Jim Mannix, some mood-expanding guitar licks by David Fiedler, and SMIL coding by myself.
As you may recall, SMIL is a derivative, or "flavor" of XML. It carries with it the rules of XML, and a few of its own as well. For instance, like XML, all tags must have both beginnings and endings. You are already familiar with a similar syntax if you've been using HTML. Examples include <B>bold</B> and <I>italic</I> tags. The SMIL language requires you to also use endings for empty elements, such as the break tag: <BR />. SMIL is also all lower case, so the proceeding tag would actually be: <br />. Also, all attribute values must be surrounded by double quotation marks, i.e.
<font color="blue">The font's color attribute is enclosed in 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.
[Move on to the next part of the article.]
This article first appeared in June, 1998.
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