Thanks,
I've been playing with GSAP a little more and can focus my questions a bit better now. My goal is to have a set of functions that will automatically calculate the transformation needed to pan and scale the document to center a given DOM element (or SVG element). Below is a CodePen that shows the basic approach I've been trying. Note that I am translating the entire document body to give the pan effect.
I am having trouble figuring out how to include the zooming effect, though. I'm not sure where to set the transformOrigin on the body (or, generally, a parent element) so that the focus element ends up centered in the viewport. The obvious (to me) solutions have not worked, and I can't tell whether I'm missing something about how CSS transforms work or I'm just screwing up the math---probably both. Any help here is appreciated!
http://codepen.io/yamad/pen/LVWYgM
As for SVGs going to rasters, I definitely understand that GSAP doesn't do the rendering. But I thought others might have tips for how to get browsers (WebKit/Chrome, for the most part) to look as good as possible during zoom/pan animations. For instance, I saw a tip somewhere that you can often inhibit the rasterization by normalizing to the largest scale you want to show.