On Wed, 2004-07-28 at 01:56, herve couvelard wrote:
I use inkscape almost everydays. that is a really great application. I convert all the windows users at my office to linux users. That was not that hard. I was 'forced' :-) to convert them from paintshoppro/illustrator to inkscape. That was quite easy too. Inkscape is such an friendly-user-app. We use it for cartography means : drawing polygons on rasters images.
Sounds very cool. If there is any examples that you could show us, that would be very cool. Also, if you wanted to write up your experiences I know that we'd link to it on the website -- I'm sure that other websites would be interested also.
(also, if you wanted to do it in English, I would be willing to help edit -- I'm sure others would too)
ok let's come to the question : Would it be possible to 'execute' an external binary on the active document? i read every mails for such a long time and aware (it's good to be aware) of the coming extension stuff. how will it work ? would it be possible to provide a 'simple' binary that do the job and just put it in some place ? (like C or C++ or whatever) what could the junction with inkscape be ? will all the changes made by the binary be updated in the preview immedilately ? how could that come from a menu in inkscape ?
That is most definitely the plan! It is cool to have a user request it as much as we say: "users would like this" :) Right now we are working out the details, Bryce and I hope to have something very solid done this weekend.
What we are currently planning is that there will be a menu entitled "Effects" in Inkscape. This will probably start out small, but will hopefully grow to have lots of things that can be done in Inkscape. The way that each of these will work is to take the current document, modify it in some way, and then have that modified document be the new document. Some possible effects would be like drop shadow, where you could select a square in Inkscape, click on Effects > Dropshadow, and then there will be a square with a shadow behind it in your document.
We're planning multiple ways that someone could write these Effects. But definitely one way will be a script on the command line. That script will be given an SVG document, a list of the elements in that document that are selected, and then it should return an SVG document where the effect has been applied. We're calling this 'scripting'. Currently this is done for most of the open/save formats that Inkscape supports.
Also, you talked a little bit about how these are added. Currently, if you look, there will be a bunch of files that end in '.inkmod' that are installed with Inkscape. While these will change name to '.inx', Inkscape will continue to read these files on startup. If you make more of these files, there will be more extensions in your system.
I'm very excited by your use of Inkscape - we're hoping to make the whole extensions system much more mature for 0.40. Please, if you could list some of your ideas, and what you would need to do those, we can make sure that those are possible.
--Ted