On Wed, 2003-12-03 at 23:05, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Also, I notice that they did not specifically say they'd fund adding Python support to Sodipodi "and etc." but rather to write a spec for a universal scripting approach across multiple apps. So it might be hard at this point to make a strong enough proposal for this for Inkscape. This might be work-aroundable if the patch is submitted to both Inkscape and Sodipodi.
I got this same impression, so I think what they'd really like is Bonobo to be in all the applications, and Python wrappers for Bonobo (I think there are some, but I haven't looked). This way a script could use all those applications...
Another approach I've been kicking around is if we "stole" the plugin architecture/design from another project - Karbon14 has a plugin system, for example. Gaining the savings in design time would be the primary motivation, but conceivably the plugins could then be shareable or at least portable between the apps. No idea of the feasibility, though.
I was curious if we could write a little python script (mostly stealing code) using the Sketch stuff. Basically using the Sketch input plug-ins to read in a file, and then their output SVG plug-in to put it into Inkscape. Yeah, it would be a rather heavy way to get lots of input and output formats, but I think it would work.
The basic module architecture right now is derived from the Adobe Illustrator plug-in model. There are some optimizations and changes, but that's where most of the ideas come from. I had looked at others, but the Adobe one seemed the most mature (surprise), flexible and reasonable. I think the basic ideas of 'load, unload, prefs, execute' will work for just about anything in the future. But, there are lots of things that Adobe and others have done, that we'll need. The future is bright, and I'm wearing shades :)
--Ted