El 06/03/13 17:59, Alexandre Prokoudine escribió:
Basically what I guess I need is a (much) clearer understanding of what distinguishes an "export" from a "save as". To me they seem to be very much the same thing.
But they are not. We can't claim to be able to save something if we can't open and edit it later exactly as we had that something prior to "saving". E.g. you cannot really save a PDF file, when you have SVG filters inside, because you lose the ability to tweak filters' settings; you can only export PDF and keep the original in SVG. You can't retain various metadata (like names of objects) either, and that's not great.
I think this is the most important point to keep in mind. Also I'd like to ask that maybe our poor distinction between save and export comes from an import strategy that isn't properly defined.
If the process of opening a file destroys some of its original data, then it wasn't opened, it was imported. We can "open" PDFs but some things can be lost in translation. Inkscape actually imports a PDF and converts it to SVG, and when it "saves" it back, it is actually exporting the SVG tree to a PDF document. Even making the process of importing and exporting that data perfect (which is not at the moment and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it to be so) it's still an import/export process. Data is translated into different data.
So, let's forget for a moment what programs usually do (although I'd like to see statistics about how many high end programs that support multiple formats do it through open and save commands and don't provide an export command for lossy formats). Let's focus on a reasonable workflow which minimizes the confusion and data loss.
GIMP devs did this and it resulted in popular outrage, but all the people ranting about it are ranting because their use habits had to be changed, not because the changed made the things worse. In fact, I don't think I heard anybody saying that now is more likely to loose your work or overwrite your original assets with edited than it used to be.
I think it's ok if Inkscape minimizes the risk of overwriting a multiple page CMYK PDF with a single page SVG. I think it's ok if inkscape prevents users from overwriting a JPG wih a SVG with jpg extension. Actually, I'm not only ok with that. I would prefer that Inkscape has a consistent command to open and save native, editable files and leaves the rest as import/export, because it would make more sense. Right now there's a weird mix: You can save and export to PNG, you can only "save" to PDF but the PDF format requires the rasterization of several editable objects (blurred objects, for instance) which will render them uneditable.
The only reasonable argument against this change is "hey, I'm used to it and I'd prefer to keep it this way", but it's not a compelling argument. It's just status quo and not necessarily the best solution for the problem.
Gez.