On Fri, Mar 8, 2013 at 5:07 PM, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:

On Wed, 2013-03-06 at 14:22 -0800, Josh Andler wrote:
> I'm in favor of us going the route that GIMP did. A) Because it makes
> sense
> and people won't accidentally only write to an "improper" format. B)
> For consistency.

Ugh, do you hate your users? When has OCD Logic ever made good design
before? The Gimp decision was poor judgment, ignoring many work-flows.

Change the logic round. If we must keep svg files for everything, then
do so. Save them in `/.cache/inkscape/shit-people-saved-wrong/ and just
open them back up when needed. svg.gz. It's not like the majority of svg
files are huge (with exceptions).

I'd like to think we can sort out our definition first. I've heard no
convincing rhetoric in favour of save meaning svg, nor that it 'means'
lossy. I believe Save_As means 'remember this name and format for
future' and Export_As means 'forget this name and format for future'.
That's how many workflows consider those functions to work.

Martin,

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/export

I've always taken export to mean what 3) on that page says -

3. Computers. to save (documents, data, etc.) in a format usable by another software program.

ie you have an SVG which is the format inkscape is natively using, you want something else.

whereas save http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/save?s=t

10. Computers. to copy (a file) from RAM onto a disk or other storage medium.

The file in memory is always a SVG, so you cant save as anything else...

like I said, I believe its wrong that we claim to open anything other than SVG, we dont, we import/translate them into an svg with varying levels of success. likewise, we can only save an svg, anything else is an export with a varying level of compatability.