Hi All, It's been a long time (my alias is cleary) - We're beginning to see inkscape get some traction in our company as a tool for non-designers to make small changes to templates/documents that our designers create.
An example scenario: Our HR Dept does Job Vacancy releases. These job vacancy documents have fairly standard elements, and the vast majority of changes that the HR guys need to make are as simple as changing the date, or location.
The workflow I'm looking to introduce is: the Designers create a template, HR can then take that template, make minor text changes, export to PDF and distribute.
There are two niggles in the way inkscape handles this process, and I'd like to at least open up some discussion on resolving these niggles.
1st Niggle: Exporting to PDF is a "Save" operation, not an "Export" operation After they've made some changes, the users must remember to save as SVG first before saving as PDF in order to maintain a compatible "source" document. They also have to remember that after saving as PDF, they are no longer working on the source document.
Proposal: Expand the "Export to Bitmap" File menu item to include PDF, and potentially other formats that are not suitable as a "source" document ie they can't preserve an adequate level of info - layers, objects etc By doing this, The Export action creates the PDF (or non-source suitable) document, and any subsequent modifications are still saved to the source SVG document without any further opening/closing/saving over existing docs. Gimp recently introduced this idea I believe.
2nd Niggle: The current "Templates" handling involves maintaining documents in a dir under the inkscape profile dir. This requires some bespoke SOE handling for multiple users to get access to multiple templates.
Proposal: Introduce an "inkscape template" file extension in a similar fashion to popular office suites (.svgt?). The file is no different to a standard inkscape svg, the only difference would be that when you go to Save the document for the first time, it forces you to use the Save As... dialog so you don't overwrite the template. This would allow users to keep templates *anywhere*, and won't require any significant training or support to make sure there's no accidental clobbering of the template documents.
I'd be keen to hear people's thoughts, and I realise this may be better as two separate discussions. My programming skills are fairly atrophied these days, but I would definitely consider having a crack at patching something. Paying for the features either in the form of a project donation or by specifically hiring resources are also possibilities.
Thanks for your consideration, Bernard Gray