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:

http://www.xara.com/press/

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