On 11/25/07, Ted Gould <ted@...11...> wrote:

On Sun, 2007-11-25 at 12:16 -0700, Michael Yinger wrote:
> I haven't gotten a single flame for my posting, but I've gotten
> curiosity about what we are doing with Inkscape, so I thought I'd say
> a little more.

Mike, thanks for giving us more information.  I'm not sure if you got
any responses on people interested in the contract work, but I will say
that you're one of the first people I know who's asked.  So we don't
have a mature services network aligned with Inkscape.

> We have proprietary C++ code for doing variable data printing. We
> aren't really interested in being variable data design experts and are
> moving in a direction that bears tangentially on our VDP code. We
> would like to put our VDP code into this community of programmers who
> might find it interesting and add to it. This may help Inkscape and us
> too. Make sense? Let me know if you think we are off base.
>
> Does Inkscape have a business logic subsystem that can drive graphic
> design and text and image replacement based on user defined business
> rules?

Inkscape doesn't have that per se, but we do have things that are
similar.  An example of that would be the connectors and libavoid code.
What it does is attach additional data onto the SVG shapes, and then
process that with regards to the positions of other objects.  I'm
guessing that is some of what you're looking for.

We do some data driven documents using XSLT to make our tutorials.  The
reason for doing this is that translators can translate the text, which
may end up being a different length than the original language, and
still have the entire document flow correctly.  You might look at some
of that, to see what would be possible.

Also, you may look at attacking your problem from the SVG side.  There
are many people who are creating data driven SVG documents, some of them
are then editing them in Inkscape or other tools.  One example would be
mapping:

   http://www.carto.net/williams/yosemite/

There are a few consultants that are doing SVG work directly, I'm sure
they'd be willing to work with you.

                        --Ted