On 2006-December-02 , at 02:55 , Denis Leroy wrote:
Hi,
The current PostScript input extensions are dependent on the skconvert utility (it uses pstoedit -f sk to produce sketch format), itself part of Skencil, a "competing" (? :-) ) vector drawing project. [...] So my questions: why the skconvert dependency ? Are there any alternatives ? pstoedit has many output formats (such as plot-svg using GNU libplot), is it possible to use a different one to achieve the same result ?
I agree with you in the fact that depending on skencil for ps input is a too large dependency. I modified the input extension to use only pstoedit and it works correctly on my system. nevertheless, when I asked if this was a possible change, I was explained that the choice to use skencil was motivated by two facts: - pdf input was done by pdf > ps > skencil > svg and this gave better results that pdf > ps > svg via pstoedit (namely: it keeps text as text and does not convert it to shapes). this was explained by Bryce if I recall correctly. but this was tested a long time ago and from what I see now, there is no more pdf input extension... - the plot-svg device is not available in all releases of pstoedit. In particular previous versions of FC included an version which required to install a other package -plotutils I think- to get plot- svg and plotutils was not a required dependency of pstoedit. Things are the same on Debian Sarge. And there is no way to test for the availability of plot-svg from inside the input extension. Therefore, depending on pstoedit may not be sufficient to ensure ps input. once again this was based on some tests conducted a while ago, maybe plotutils is now integrated into pstoedit or always listed as a dependency.
I would recommend to: - test if the results are similar for eps and ps input (the only two input formats which depend on org.inkscape.input.ps now) with skconvert and pstoedit - collect information on which versions of pstoedit are shipped now and check if they include plot-svg what do others think?
I can tell you that the versions of pstoedit obtained via Fink or DarwinPorts on mac OS X both 10.3 and 10.4 (the two versions currently supported by Inkscape) works like a charm and includes plot- svg.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/