Can we try to compromise a bit between standpoints? :) I would like to read a much more pragmatic discussion, and not an idealistic one where people are turtling inside their own base!
I feel Inkscape is a vector graphics editor, that happens to be tailored to SVG. I think it is too idealistic/conservative/... to simply pose "Inkscape is an SVG editor" and ignore all our users *and developers* that do not use it as such. If some design choice would go very much against SVG, we should say nay; but if a design issue can be solved with other vector formats in mind, so much for the better.
I don't think there is anything wrong/superfluous with the functionality of the current state, there is only functionality missing. Being able to open a PDF/EMF/..., and save (ctrl+s) back to that format directly is a great plus, and is not something that should be removed. Preventing this by way of "protecting the user" is an insult against our users. Functionality that is missing is saving only a selection or a cropped version of the file for other file formats besides PNG. This for me would be nice for an export dialog. For those who want to see "logic" everywhere: open + save = acting on the full current document import + export = parts of document. E.g. import does not open a new document window, it imports it as a part into the current document. Export behaves like "save a copy", and provides bells and whistles to save only a selection, etc.
-Johan
On 7-3-2013 23:59, Josh Andler wrote:
Uhm... from our homepage:
About Inkscape
An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.
I understand that we have people who have worked really hard to support lots of features in other formats, but realistically it's because those developers had itches to scratch. Bulia Byak, as a graphic designer, implemented tons of features and a better support of lots of things because he needed those things. Likewise, I bet your interest in improving EMF support is because it makes your life easier (and of course it's awesome that it will help lots of other people).
But let's not kid ourselves... if we just wanted to make the best object oriented vector graphics program, we wouldn't have chosen to limit ourselves by format. There is a lot that can't currently be described in SVG and to which there is no way to work around without raster hacks to support other renderers.
Cheers, Josh
On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 2:21 PM, mathog <mathog@...1176...> wrote:
On 07-Mar-2013 06:33, LucaDC wrote:
Inkscape is an SVG editor, no?
Actually, no, it is much more than that. Inkscape is the best free object based drawing program, and provides a good alternative to Adobe Illustrator. In most ways I like Inkscape much better than Illustrator. Inkscape happens to store its drawings in a slight variant of standard SVG, which is convenient in many ways, but that is not the end of the story. Often we need that drawing in another format, PDF, or EMF, or whatever. Inkscape is able to convert between many of these other formats and its internal SVG format, often with no or minimal losses. For instance, for EMF, which I am painfully familiar with, the majority of EMF record types can be imported into SVG with no loss, and then saved back out again to EMF, again with no loss. (Here I am describing the cross platform lp988601 branch, not the release branch, which has more limited EMF support, and then only for the Windows platform.) There may be some neutral conversions from one type to another (a rectangle might become a polygon of the same size and shape). There are a few areas that are not quite fully implemented yet (for instance BKMODE, or gradient import) and others which most likely will never be fully implemented (like the raster operation specifiers for BLT operations - which are not object based). But those quibbles aside, one could equally say that "Inkscape is an EMF editor". The statement is true so long as one avoids the drawing options within Inkscape that cannot be translated to EMF. One can easily imagine code modifications which would disable these functions when an Inkscape document is created by reading an EMF file, making the statement entirely true. (I am not proposing that, just saying that it would not be hard to do.)
Look at the two example EMF images here, which contain examples of most types of EMF records:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/libuemf/Both of those can be loaded into Inkscape and written back out again, and the only parts that will be lost are the two little rainbow colored gradient regions at 9:00 in the unrotated image (gradient import is not yet implemented - there seems to be a deep bug in Microsoft's own software regarding the handling of linear gradient records from EMF files, which makes testing in this area very difficult.) Inkscape can already export its own gradients to EMF, but it is an emulation, sending out a colored gradient composed of overlapping thin objects that in sum looks like the original gradient. This is typical for EMF export in most programs, I think because others have also been unable to work around the MS gradient bugs. (It is not widely appreciated, but AFAIK no windows program can save and retrieve a simple gradient record to an EMF file. It just looks like they can because they all use this same emulation technique.)
Regards,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech
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