I agree with everything Charles said, and I was not trying to say we need internal PDF support _instead of_ UC, but rather _in addition_ to it. Here are a few very practical reasons why:
- My expericence shows that even in the best commercial products, vector import/export is ridiculously inadequate. Quirks and errors are the norm, not exception. Therefore it's always good to have an alternative route.
- PDF is not just "a" vector format. It's the closest we have to the most common denominator. Its support is critical for interoperability.
- UC requires not only Perl, but lots of Perl modules. For example, even on my Linux machine I still cannot run it because CPAN errors out when trying to install the needed stuff. So for UC to be usable, especially on Windows, we need to carry all this stuff packaged with Inkscape. I'm not saying it's impossible or even undesirable, but this requires quite some effort from packagers (see e.g the "extensions on Windows" saga, still not finished).
- Bob will confirm, having recently worked on ODG export, that having access to the internals of Inkscape is a big help for an export format coder. Again, I don't want to say that we must force everyone to learn Inkscape in order to write support for some format, and this is where UC has a rightful place. But, again, PDF is special and deserves all help we can give it.
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org