Is there a way to pin the location of a bone while editing? Like if you are creating a typical walk cycle, you want to add a keyframe but you want the foot bone in contact with the ground to not move. Currently i have been eyeballing this. Like I will construct my new animation frame and then translate the root of the skeleton so that the foot in contact with the ground looks like it is in the same position, but I would like it to be exact.

I understand this has to do with IK but not clear on if there is a way of using IK just in the Spine editor without altering the output JSON. (I use custom code to parse and render Spine JSON in a custom game framework and only support the features I need).

Actually even if there was just a way to say, "translate the whole skeleton so that this bone X is at position Y" where X is not necessarily the root bone, that would be good enough.

I'm implementing Spine integration into a custom engine just from the exported JSON, without using the runtime.

I need to know that when an animation involves interpolating between rotations should I always interpolate along the smaller angle? i.e. if theta1 is 0 and and theta2 is 270, you could travel through positive 270 degrees to get from theta1 to theta2 counter-clockwise or could travel through -90 degrees to get to theta2 clockwise. Does spine always choose the latter because 90 is less than 270?