On Thu, Dec 01, 2005 at 09:18:41AM -0800, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
# from bulia byak # on Wednesday 30 November 2005 11:29 pm:
Over the past year or so, I've been fishing around for a volunteer to implement this. ?But unfortunately I'm coming up dry. ?Ain't no one I can find with an itch to implement this, not on a volunteer basis anyway.
What about the Uberconverter?
I'm currently working on the xar2crs program, and will be into svg2crs very soon. Then, of course crs2xar and crs2svg. If someone wanted to add crs2pdf and pdf2crs, that would be an awesome next step.
Agreed. Can you explain how you are considering doing the svg support? Have you looked at the libsvg work that Carl Worth did?
Possibly the pdf portion of the svg2pdf tool may be worth using for a crs2pdf tool?
The xar format is really similar to pdf and ps in a lot of basic ways. There are (of course) a whole lot of differences too. Comparison:
http://scratchcomputing.com/projects/uber-converter/chromista_features.html
The plan for chromista (the svg,xar,pdf,ps hub) is to essentially design a random-access database in YAML format which can represent all of the xar entities, metadata, etc. So, if you want to create a ps/pdf from that, you just have to reach in and grab all of the data and turn it into a stream. Support for higher-level xar objects like quickshapes, morphs (blends), etc. will be much later, but the svg/pdf/ps connectors will probably need some common down-conversion at that point. This might be done via a "dumber" version of chromista (using a utility program to downconvert within the hub.)
If the inkscape group can come up with a volunteer or paid developer, I would be happy to help them work within the uber-converter framework. As for the current efforts, I'm hoping to have something workable within a few weeks.
Great, I think it sounds like Carl's svg2pdf tool may give us a semi-feasible near term quick win, but longer term we're going to need something more maintainable, and from this sense, having it built atop uberconverter sounds like the ideal long term solution.
I haven't been following this too closely, what's the preferred library for PDF?
Well, we don't really have one yet, but Cairo is probably the strongest contender here at the moment. I'll talk with Carl more about uberconverter tomorrow.
Bryce