Dear all,

I am palaeontologist at the University of Bonn, Germany, focusing on
fossil dinosaur footprints and trackways. I regularly use Inkscape for
my research (for measuring, data extration, and drawing of interpretive
outlines), and have cited this software in several of my papers.

I am currently working on a methodological paper on how to analyze
fossil footprints based on 3D models. The approach I will present in
this paper includes Inkscape as an important component. The idea is to
import raster images into Inkscape (different graphical 2D
representations of the 3D model), align them into an image stack, and
draw interpretive outlines on a separate layer. I use the Bezier curves
tool to collect a number of landmark coordinates from the separate
footprints, which I then export to automatically calculate a large
number of measurements for statistical analysis. The paper is to be
published in a peer-revied journal (currently, I have the Journal of
Palaeontological Techniques in mind,
https://www.jpaleontologicaltechniques.org/).

I already used this method in a recent paper
(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2018.1512501) to
rapidly collect measurements of a larger number of trackways. The aim of
the new methodological paper is to improve this method and to make it
available to our comunity of footprint researchers. However, there are
two open issues/questions regarding Inkscape. I was wondering if you
could give me some advice here.

Export of path node coordinates is, unfortunately, currently possible
only via a plugin, which adds an additional hitch (but I understand that
research is not the focus of Inkscape). Such a plugin was posted on the
Inkscape Forum in 2011, with improvements added by different members
(https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02724634.2018.1512501). I
simplified the code so that it returns node coordinates only (and not
those of the handles), see code below.

Now to my questions:

1) I need to cite the modified coord export script in my paper, and make
sure that it stays available. I assume that code published in the forum
is not automatically released under a free licence, and that I cannot
simply distribute the script together with the paper. A possibility
might be to post the modified script to the forum and provide the link
in the paper. This is only an option if the link remains available for a
longer time (I cannot modify the paper once published). What would be
the optimal way?

2) The coordinates given by the script need to be mirrored and
translated to match the coordinates displayed within Inkscape itself. I
would need to improve the script so that this is done automatically. I'm
not into python scripting, but would try to figure this out. Any
help/hints with this would be much appreciated.

Thank you very much in advance.

Kind regards,
Jens Lallensack



----- xyexport.py -------

#!/usr/bin/env python

import inkex
import sys
import simpletransform
import cubicsuperpath

class TemplateEffect(inkex.Effect):
     def __init__(self):
         inkex.Effect.__init__(self)
     def effect(self):
         for node in self.selected.iteritems():
             output_all = output_nodes = ""
             for id, node in self.selected.iteritems():
                 if node.tag == inkex.addNS('path','svg'):
                     output_all += ""
                     output_nodes += ""
                     simpletransform.fuseTransform(node)
                     d = node.get('d')
                     p = cubicsuperpath.parsePath(d)
                     for subpath in p:
                         for csp in subpath:
                             output_nodes += str(csp[1][0]) + "\t" +
str(csp[1][1]) + "\n"
             sys.stderr.write(output_nodes)
effect = TemplateEffect()
effect.affect()
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