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Hi alltogether,
On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 09:18:31AM +0100, Ralf Stephan wrote:
In my experience, the main Inkscape usage is not printing, so i question if the default empty document should really be a full page
but you're not a beginner, so please step back :) even I who knows the program uses it only with A4, and mostly for printing.
Me too ;-) And I think that we could go a stepp further and use the standeard papersize the user has on its computer. While I was a bit lazy to express this opinion until now, a bug report I received in debian's BTS triggered this email. Daniel Kahn Gillmor writes:
Inkscape is great! my only complaint is that it always launches by default with A4 paper (yes, i'm an American... sigh).
when i change /usr/share/inkscape/default.svg by hand, new versions of inkscape overwrite my changes.
it seems like there are enough clues available in debian to pick the system's preferred default paper size and set up /usr/share/inkscape/default.svg with symlinks or something during package installation.
possible options include:
- LC_PAPER (locale's paper settings)
- debconf:libpaper/defaultpaper (at the moment only requested by
- libpaper1)
- /etc/papersize or /usr/bin/paperconf
These last two come from the libpaper1 package, which maybe would mean inkscape would have an additional dependency (though it's not a heavyweight one).
Even fancier would be for inkscape to decide which package is the default at runtime using /usr/bin/paperconf or LC_PAPER or something similar. This would let different users on the same system have their own preferred default paper sizes just by setting environment variables.
While most of his suggestions are highly debian specific, I guess there must be a possibility to get the default locale and adjust the default document size accordingly.
Probably I'll file a RFE for that.
Thanks,
Wolfi
PS: The full report is at http://bugs.debian.org/342388