On 2008-March-14 , at 22:04 , bulia byak wrote:
It's always bad when the UI offers two ways to do the same thing without really explaining what's the difference. It's equally bad when UI uses some meaningless techno jargon such as "cairo" :) Unfortunately 0.46 was released still in the middle of a transition period which made both these evils inevitable. Now that we're in 0.47, however, I would like to address this issue by switching all of PS, EPS, and PDF output to cairo, removing the builtin Inkscape exporter, and purging the mentions of "cairo" from the UI.
As a matter of fact, this has already partially happened (not sure who did this). Right now both PS export options work via cairo and produce identical output. The Inkscape-native PDF export is nowhere to be seen. The only exporter which still uses native code is EPS. However, since 1.5.2 cairo can produce EPS files too, so this can all be done in one place now (closng several EPS export bugs along the way). The only downside is that it will require cairo >= 1.5.2, is everyone OK with that?
Since cairo >1.5.2 is also needed to get decent PDF output (i.e. not rasterized) I think this is not a problem.
By the way, the latest cairo 1.5.12 finally fixes the bug where zooming in too closely in Outline mode produced messy broken lines. Now everything is neat and clean. Upgrade is recommended.
Argh, just did a build two days ago with 1.5.10 :(
BTW, regarding saving in other vector formats, if those become Cairo based, they will probably all offer the same functionality. Said functionality is approaching the one for bitmap export thanks to your recent changes (export only one object, all drawing regardless of page size). So would it be possible to uniformize things a little and move all lossy export solutions (i.e. everything that's not SVG in fact...) to a single export command and dialog? There were several discussions already and the bottom line (one of the bottom lines at least ;)) was that, while the functionality of bitmap and vector exports were not approximately on par, it was not a good idea to put them together. Now that they are it would, IMHO, make more sense. There is a (long) launchpad bug about this https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/168627
To summarize it all in one usage example: - open and draw something (happily, since it's so cool) in Inkscape - save (as SVG) - save as > foobar.pdf - try to close window file => get nag screen about PDF possibly causing data loss [Hell, why propose it to me then?!] - OK then click "Save as SVG" [Nothing has changed since I first saved it as SVG so why should I save it back once again?...] => Do I want to overwrite the existing SVG file? [Yes I do, I just clicked the button to do that. But wait what I am overwriting exactly? I made no changes to this drawing...] - click cancel => back to the file chooser - click cancel again [OK, back where I started] - close window => nag screen again [Grmlmmrr...] - click "Close withouth saving" and hope for the best The (frustrated) end
Of course I exaggerated a lot but you get the point. I should have used "save a copy" rather than save as, but isn't this menu item precisely proof that these things should be under "export"?
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/