On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Alan Horkan wrote:
Maybe a novel idea would be to make separate project on sourceforge that is svg clipart. Like svg-clipart.sf.net would be great.
not what sodipodi can do for you, ask what you can do for sodipodi" ;) Is an independent repository of svg better than an application-tied clipart gallery (like dia has fex)? The flag rally DID increase visibility of sodipodi, for example.
[is 'fex' the username of someone inlcuded in the crosspost? It is quite confusing I dont know the word at all]
I parsed it as "for example".
*Continuing the case for map symbols... (the wikitravel mapmaking thing really got me started ;)
Dia has some Map Symbols, if i recally correctly Ian Redfern used his perl scripting to generate files for Dia from PDF (and postcript i think), and i think he had plans to update his script to also generate pure SVG.
I've been trying to collect tools that can be useful to mechanically convert things into SVG: http://inkscape.org/tools.php
Perhaps existing collections can be run through these tools, as a time-efficient way to bulk up the symbol repository. Probably a lot wouldn't convert across well, but even if you get just a portion, that'd be an easy way to start building the collection. Of course, licensing would need to be taken into account...
There are probably some WMF symbol lib's out there with licenses that can be used, or authors that are willing to allow them to be used under open source licenses if asked. The WMF->SVG tools I've used have not worked very well for me, but this may have been due to the way the symbols were made.
Point is, it's useful, interesting and fun... :)
I'd love to see a shared library of clipart, preferably in a cleaned homogenized SVG and installed to a standard location (freedesktop.org anyone?) with a few categories that could be shared across any application that was interested (I'm thinking Gnome-office).
That'd be very cool.
Note that they key enabling factor for this project to work well and scale is to have a smooth and easy clipart submission process. Minimizing human administration per submission is very important. CVS can work in a pinch, although many artists won't know it and may not want to bother learning it.
A web-based file-upload tool might be a good start, especially if it can keep track of the author, explicit licensing statement, etc. Keep it simple though - if it takes more than 3 min for a new contributor to learn, it's probably too complicated.
The ideal approach would be a WebDAV repository that people could mount as a local file system (much like NFS or Samba, but works over http). I don't think SF supports WebDAV, and even if it did, you're limited to 100mb on the website. Instead I would recommend looking at tigris.org, who host subversion (which is WebDAV-based), and provide services similar to SourceForge. This seems like the type of project they may be very interested in, and they certainly have WebDAV know-how.
Anyway, with WebDAV set up, you can use the repository using a file manager like File Explorer (on Windows), or mounted as a file system (on Linux). Some applications such as Illustrator, understand WebDAV directly, and I understand they can load-from and save-to the remote repository directly. One could imagine that having an active WebDAV repository would be ample motivation to get similar support built into Inkscape... ;-)
Bryce