I’ve been creating a drawing plugin for TiddlyWiki (SVN trunk). It delegates the actual drawing editing to Project Draw (docs; demo), a browser-based drawing editor from Autodesk Labs.

Here’s a screencast:

TiddlyWiki Drawing Plugin based on Project Draw from Michael Mahemoff on Vimeo.

Autodesk Labs’ Project Draw editor looks like this:

… and the tool has a nice set of RESTful services we can make use of:

Project Draw doesn’t have any specialised cross-domain API, e.g. using JSON or OAuth, so normally you would have to proxy any calls via the server. However, a standard TiddlyWiki runs against a file:// URL and can therefore bypass cross-domain restrictions; hence, it was possible to build this plugin using the same kind of XMLHttpRequest calls as Project Draw does for its own RESTful services demo.

One likely use of Project Draw is in conjunction with TiddlyDocs, which will generally run as a standard website - off a http:// URL. Hence, we will need to do some proxying in order to get around cross-domain restrictions.

Also, the tool isn’t fully working in IE yet; I’m working on that.

You create a new drawing with the New Drawing menu item. This is simply a <<newDrawing>> macro and could appear anywhere in the page.

And you can set image dimensions in edit mode:

… which will cause images to be clipped depending on the dimensions:

By default, images are rendered as SVG, using the tricks I discussed earlier for inline SVG. However, this is only supported for non-IE browsers, or IE with Flash-based SVG support. I am still working on IE support. Without SVG, the image will fall back to a bitmap image (fortunately, Project Draw can output an image as SVG or bitmap). However, note that the bitmap image always shows the whole thing; so rather than being clipped, it will re-scale, which could lead to a lot of whitespace being shown in TiddlyWiki. For this reason, in Project Draw, you should set the page dimensions to avoid any whitespace: