On Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 09:58:18AM -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Got some good news...
Eric Wilhelm, developer of the Uber-Converter and member of the Inkscape community, is being sponsored by Xara to develop a graphics converter to allow Xara and Inkscape users to more easily share documents.
Xara's full press release is here:
http://www.xara.com/press/pressrelease.asp
Sorry, weird javascript on that link... Try this:
See 'Xara sponsors Open Source project'
This tool will benefit both Xara and Inkscape. Xara will gain support for an important graphics file format quickly becoming a standard in the Open Source community. Inkscape will gain a new file converter that will allow Inkscape users to more seamlessly convert to and from Xara. In addition, due to Uber-converter's "hub" architecture, this may enable support for several further file formats.
For some background... this effort came about after Charles Moir of Xara and I had some discussions about how Xara could become more involved in the Open Source community and the Inkscape community in particular. Since Xara does not yet support SVG, a xar2svg/svg2xar effort was clearly a logical first step. With Xara providing this code under the GPL, it makes a valuable contribution to the community, too!
Anyway, it's great to welcome Xara to the Inkscape community; I hope we'll be able to work together with them even more closely in the future.
Bryce