Re: [Inkscape-devel] filter for inkscape and OpenDocument
On Mon, 31 Jan 2005, Nicu Buculei wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
> I've investigated and experimented with creating a converter that would
> enable support for the OpenOffice format in Inkscape. The code appears
> to already exist in OpenOffice, although it would be some trouble to
> extricate. However, this problem could be easily addressed if
> OpenOffice could provide a cmdline script to run their SVG export
> extension. I.e., a sxd2svg. Given that, we could easily add support
> for this file format to Inkscape.
as a disadvantage, this will require a full working copy of
OpenOffice.org installed.
Not necessarily. The svg export extension is packaged as an .so. ldd
reports that it has some dependencies, some of which may be part of
OOo, but if it were necessary to distribute this independently of OOo, I
think there's an outside possibility that it could.
i know Inkscape use the same method for importing other file types,
but
if we consider OpenOffice as a dependency, this is a *huge* one.
It depends. It is only a dependency if someone wishes to import this
file format. Presumably, if they did, they are using OpenOffice and
will have it installed. So yes it is a large dependency size-wise, but
it's much more likely to be present on the user's system than some of
the other things we depend on.
Also note that Inkscape will install even if some of its expected
extensions aren't installed. It'll warn the user and add an error
message to the extensions error log, but will otherwise run fine.
In any case, the point is not that this is a perfect solution but that
it is one that could be obtained with a minimal amount of effort.
I think a poor solution would be to expect that someone will write a new
OODraw-to-svg converter. If someone is gung-ho to do that, more power
to them, but if not, it duplicates effort that would probably better
spent at helping OpenOffice gain an SVG importer, too. ;-)
Bryce