# from Alexandre Prokoudine # on Tuesday 27 September 2005 08:04 am:
On 9/27/05, Eric Jonas <jonas@...415...> wrote:
Inkscape should support SVG natively and only SVG. That's our purpose. If we can redirect all filetype conversion efforts to software that has conversion as its purpose, there are gains for the whole community. </imho>
Do you mean "inkscape should only ever produce SVG files, and leave the conversion to other external programs"? or "We should really try and avoid implementing our own conversion libraries, and just use what's out there"? They seem to be two very different things, both from an inkscape-developer-effort perspective and a usability one.
Note that "leave the conversion to external programs" does not mean the user must switch to a terminal and run an application. The export will have the same functionality for the user whether it is a plugin or native code. So, there is no reason to add import/export code to the main tree (though aggregating the required programs *next to* the tree in the distribution will simplify the dependency issues.
I suspect that from developer's POV it's easier to use CLI options of other applications to provide import/export (I/E) in different formats. From users POV appilcations should support everything natively. It is usability disaster to keep some applications installed just because they have required I/E functionality.
I agree if you are talking about the proposed use of scribus for I/E, but I also think that using it in the short term is better than nothing.
This topic is often raised in forum/conferences etc. Users do want one good vector I/E library to be reused by different applications.
Thus creation of previously announced Üver-Convertor (I'm lost for words to express my disagreement with this nietschianish name, actually) is quite a good solution.
Heh. You're not the first. It started as a working title and sort of stuck, but right now it seems to be about 50/50 for and against the name (I wonder why that is?) Does it help to know that this is only the name of the project and that the programs themselves have much more mundane names like svg2crs?
--Eric