On 08-Jan-2015 04:40, Diego Nuñez wrote:
I also agree with Sebastian, that an option for setting that directly in the command line would be better and cleaner.
Ok, but...
There are kind of a lot of them (11 at present), and many of them don't have descriptions that lend themselves very well to single letter or single word command line options. These are the descriptions:
"Convert texts to paths" "Map Unicode to Symbol font" "Map Unicode to Wingdings" "Map Unicode to Zapf Dingbats" "Use MS Unicode PUA "Compensate for PPT font bug" "Convert dashed/dotted lines to single lines" "Convert gradients to colored polygon series" "Use native rectangular linear gradients" "Map all fill patterns to standard EMF hatches" "Ignore image rotations"
And these are the internal variable names potentially similar to the command line names, but I think not very easy to understand. Note that almost all of these are present to work around various PowerPoint bugs, whether or not the names indicate that:
textToPath TnrToSymbol TnrToWingdings TnrToZapfDingbats UsePUA FixPPTCharPos FixPPTDashLine FixPPTGrad2Polys FixPPTLinGrad FixPPTPatternAsHatch FixImageRot
Other input/output extensions will also have options, and they most likely will not overlap very much. If we place all of this at the same parameter level as --file we risk burying the most important command line options in detritus on an "inkscape -h". Also there are already quite a lot of command line options.
This issue comes up a lot in DNA assembly and other complex programs, where there are tons of possible parameters, and the common method of solving it is to use a parameter file. Perhaps we should do the same thing here? For instance, this is a generic export, where all parameters are in the filename:
--export=filename
The named file would include lines like:
method=emf textToPath=F TnrToSymbol=T TnrToWingdings=T TnrToZapfDingbats=T UsePUA=T FixPPTDashLine=F
"method" here replaces --export-emf on the command line, and the rest of them are export parameters. Any not named would default to the stored settings? Also perhaps:
--export-help=emf
would print a help message listing all the parameters for that export type, and I suppose also the current default values.
So, for instance, a user would interact with the program like this:
inkscape --export-help # with no parameter, lists all export types inkscape --export-help=emf # reads message and learns the options, creates a file for # a certain task with an editor, then inkscape --export=ParamsForEmfFile.txt --file=in.svg
Ditto for a generic import, I suppose.
I know that we already have some command line parameters like:
--export-text-to-path
but this example shows that these are actually problematic, since there is no way to set the program to negate that value.
Also, whoever maintains this page:
https://inkscape.org/doc/inkscape-man.html
it seems a little out of date, for instance, it doesn't list the emf/wmf options.
Regards,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech