On Sun, Sep 02, 2012 at 09:18:21AM -0500, Ted Gould wrote:
So, it's been discussed, but let's actually ask the question. Who would be upset if we dropped inkview?
We know that some people use it, and we also know that many people don't use it.
Evidence for the former can be seen in bug reports filed in the last year, and in various postings to inkscape-devel. I also use it myself, for its smooth slideshow-like behaviour that can't be reproduced in Inkscape proper, and isn't as good in other SVG viewers I've tried.
(The following isn't especially relevant to Inkview or shared library discussions, but it's an interesting application of SVG (and Inkview, for the reasons described above) that readers might be interested in. The meteorology service in my country publish radar images of rainfall over the last half hour, but they also publish the individual components such as the map and transparency-using PNGs of the rainfall. SVG allows combining these components along with components that I supply such as marking landmarks of interest to me so that I can more accurately see whether it's about to rain (or stop raining) where I am. I then use inkview to view a sequence of these SVGs, so that I can see how fast the rainfall is moving and hence estimate how long until it rains or stops raining.)
As for a shared library: As I was going to write before Krzysztof said it for me, I don't think we have to give thought to a stable API, I think we just bundle together whatever objects are shared between the two. From memory, when I last looked at this, that meant just about everything: the source file that describes how to draw a shape also has the code for editing that shape, which in turn pulls in other editing dependencies. I considered separating out the bits needed only for rendering, but it's something that could only be done after discussion.
pjrm.