I was going to send this to inkscape users to help inform them about the Inkbar Barcode extension and ask if anyone know who was the author of Inkbar. Instead I thought maybe it would be better to direct it here so that developers might share their thoughts on making extensions easier to develop since Inkbar does suffer some of the common problems?
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Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 22:50:05 +0000 (GMT) From: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...> Subject: Inkscape and barcodes - Inkbar
I was thinking a barcode program could make some of the work I'm doing at the moment a lot easier, especially one I could also run on windows (Kbarcode is a good barcode AND label program but it is not availalbe for windows). On a whim I searched google for Inkscape + Barcodes and turned up a nice page in the Wiki listing some extensions* which are not included by default (doesn't make sense to include all extensions* by default). http://inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/ExtensionsRepository In particular it looks like "InkBar" might do what I need http://www.inkbar.lineaire.net/
My french is a bit rusty and I cannot see any contact or author information either on that page or included with the extension but I would apprecaite some help and perhaps my concerns with this script* are applicatable to others. I've had similar concerns before when writing scripts for the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) and some Javascript bookmarklets so these suggestions are based on a fair measure of experience, and some of things I wished I'd had to help me write my scripts.
First there is the problem of translation. I'm not sure how we can help translate third party extensions/plugins/scripts/whatever*. I would guess that perhaps certain strings would keep coming up over and over again such as Angles, Detail, Gradient, Path, or something like that so maybe Inkscape could provide some kind of stock labels which would get translated once then any script writer could reuse them (something like how Gnome stock lables are supposed to work)?
The other problem - and I've seen this a million times with GIMP scripts - is input checking. The inkbar script fails if the required 12 or 13 characters are not provided, which isn't very forgiving. (In the case of inkbar the rest could probably be padded with spaces.) In general scripts will require input checking, and hopefully this isn't something each script developer would need to writer their own collection of checks and tests for (because in that case testing is unlikely to happen at all). In the case of Python scripts (and any other scripts) there is something of a delay between the time the user sets the values and then hits OK (lets call that stage 1) to execute the script and then another delay before the script runs (stage 2). In practice this delay is usually quite short but delay and errors could be avoided if there was some immediate error checking as the user types to make sure a letter is not typed into a box where only numbers are allowed even before the OK button is hit (stage 1). After the OK button has been hit other checks may also be necessary. (Sorry very tired, I'll stop and try and explain better later, but I think I should probably have phrased things for developers in terms of preprocessing and postprocessing like on Web based forms as an example of how much easier extensions might be.)
Anyway, I could do with some help contacting the author of the Inkbar barcode extensions and I hope to get a lot of use out of it (and help make it easier to use, provide an English translation, and anything else i can think of). I do believe it could gain inkscape a lot of attention in small businesses and more. (Useful as Inkbar could be for me I'm not saying I'd want to include it by default, not yet anyway. Inkscape for artists.)
Off to see if I can modify the script to group the output to keep things tidy and stop them from falling apart.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/ http://www.linkedin.com/in/alanhorkan http://alanhorkan.livejournal.com/
* cannot use the jargon consistently, brain hurts, long day
P.S. Looking at the command line options I see they are also in French, hmm.