Hi Everybody,

I'm interested in learning how to write and display SVG in perl to create a simple, lightweight molecule viewer similar to rasmol. The advantage to using SVG would be that (hopefully) I could create quick and effective 3D effects, as well as some other effects which are hard to achieve in available molecule viewers (such as textured or hand-sketched effects). However I am having difficulty finding a good resource on manipulating SVG images in perl and I was hoping that the monks could recommend a web resource or a text book to help me.

Thanks in advance

Ben

Update

Thanks for everybodys' advice so far. I reread my node and thought it would be worth clarifying what I think a molecule viewer would need to do. When first run it would open a window into which molecule representations would be drawn, and a simple shell. You would then enter commands to tell the program to read in a pdb file, make a selection of atoms and then draw them with one of a selection of draw types -eg van der waals spheres, balls and sticks, cartoon/ribbon representations etc. You can rotate the molecule by commands from the shell, and save the SVG file when you have a view/representation you are happy with. The key factors are the elements of interactivity and a display which updates.