On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 08:51:23AM -0600, John Taber wrote:
aaron@...749... wrote:
Inkscape should support SVG natively and only SVG. That's our purpose. If we can redirect all filetype conversion efforts to software that has conversion as its purpose, there are gains for the whole community.
</imho>
But sadly not too many programs or viewers support SVG yet so a pdf export is pretty vital - I have to use bitmap export all the time to put a drawing into OpenOffice, on the web page, send an email attachment, etc - try taking your Inkscape designed flyer to Kinkos to get reproduced - they need pdf (or something else but pdf is the best option). So pdf export would be a great addition to make Inkscape a more useful program. Is it that hard to translate the java to c++ ? Shouldn't be, though I've learned nothing in software is trivial.
Batik is *huge*. Also remember that beyond just translating it to C++ would also be the work to maintain it, which would be significant.
We definitely need a pdf export capability, but even more importantly, we need someone to support and maintain it. Ideally, someone within the Inkscape community would step forward and volunteer to do this. Lacking that, the next step is to look outside Inkscape for another group that does it. It would be best to find something that doesn't have a huge installation chore attached to it, as Java-based things often seem to do.
Bryce