2015-02-15 17:20 GMT+01:00 Teto <teto45@...2519...>:

Le 02/02/2015 02:28, Bryce Harrington a écrit :
> I'd like to thank everyone that helped make this release a success.
> Often times people focus on coder contributions, but software releases
> are decidedly multi-disciplinary, and I'd like to specially credit four
> teams in particular for being well organized, thorough, and dependable.
>
> and so on...

Hi!

First I want to thank all the team about the release of 0.91, it's a
great milestone, I use it a lot since the release, and if I could
complain about some bugs and other few things, it's a good step. I
particulary appreciate the rendering, that is much faster, I really
thank for this, it was just a pain before, with drawings with a ton of
filters.

In the same time, 2 major flaws slapped me on the face, and that's why
I'm writing this e-mail (and because I've got time, too). But I want to
say that I don't want to be rude or offense anyone here, let me be clear
: My thoughts are... thoughts, not commandments. However, I would be
pleased if they are useful for the future, because I think they are
important, and I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one who think that.
(by the way, english is not my natural language...)

My first concern is about the svg format itself, that prevents the soft
to go further than the format allows to. My only question is : who cares
about the format ?

I would say millions of people.

A major driving force behind the use of Inkscape is that you can open its files directly in web browsers and upload them to Wikimedia Commons and OCAL. One of the reasons Inkscape forked from Sodipodi was that the main author of Sodipodi wanted to extend the file format in incompatible ways, while would-be Inkscape devs wanted to stay SVG-compatible. I guess the fact that Inkscape prospered and Sodipodi didn't proves that this decision was right.

Let me explain. If we take 100 guys who are using Inkscape in a
intensive way, how many do need to follow the standard ?
- If I need diagrams of things like that, svg is OK but other formats
exist and are better for this purpose.

SVG is definitely the best open format for diagrams. The only ones that come to mind are either closed (WMF, EMF, Visio) or are not designed with editing in mind (EPS, PDF).

- If I am a cartographer, I may use svg, but other formats are more
accurate.
- If I'm an artist, I don't care to be displayable directly in Firefox
or Chrome, because I won't share the original drawing anyway, for
obvious copyrights problems, I'll publish a png or jpg (in a small size)
instead. Except in Wikipedia and sites about Inkscape, I never saw a
drawing in svg. Never. Even the great manual online made by Tavmjong Bah
shows examples in png ! I think that there's no picture in svg in
Deviantart or sites like that.
- And so on.

My point is : Today many features aren't in Inskape because it's not in
the format (remember the new gradient tool, shown here one week ago.
Amazing. It's not in the actual standard so we won't be able to use it ?
Seriously ???) and I say, I don't care, because when I draw """art""" I
don't want to be restrained by a standard, even if it's well designed
like svg.

It's not as simple as that. The reason some things are not in Inkscape is that we have accumulated a lot of technical debt (simply speaking, mess in the code) and some things are much harder for the programmer than they should be. Specifically, it's not easy to create and manage <svg:switch> to store both Inkscape's editing data and its SVG representation for display. The answer is to fix the underlying problem rather than invent our own file format.

And here comes my second concern, it's about the way of how many tools
are working. LPE, filters, extensions, transform, align and distribute.
I do know that there is some "history" behind these tools, but why don't
they work together, why don't we have a single UI for all tools, why
don't we have an UI like the one used for Cycles in Blender to handle
those ? Even few functions are duplicated, we have an extension and a
LPE function for the same purpose, but not with exact behavior.

Same reason as above, technical debt. The way LPE data is stored in the SVG file causes several problems in the rest of the application.

I'm an industrial drawer. So all applications that I'm using have
historic, all action can be changed or undone. There's almost no such
thing in Inkscape (except LPE and the filters) and it's pretty sad.
Because with all tools usable under an UI like Cycles, I could do many
things and change/delete/improve them when I want. The data would be
stored in the header of the file (like filters or 3D boxes) and I could
change/re-use them when I want. I could imagine complex filters with
transformations, LPE, and so on, at once, with a total control.

By the way when will we have a script language for making our own
add-ons, without the obligation to do it in C++ ? Why all the
functions/commands can't be invoqued by a command line ? Why can't we
have something like script in Blender ? It would be so useful for people
to make their own macros, and share them easily. Another issue that
prevents Inskcape to be really popular like The Gimp (script-fu) or Blender.

Extensions can be written in any language, they just take an SVG document as input and have to produce a changed SVG document as output - they're not limited to C++.

Blender has a lot more funding compared to Inkscape, so it's no surprise it has more features.

Regards, Krzysztof