On 10-Mar-2015 20:47, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
There are people who keep hating it.
Bingo.
Another way to achieve this, without the extra "export" menu option, is to put an option in the open/save dialog that is "native only" (or something to that effect). That does pretty much the same thing as "export" does, and is, I think a more logical way of going about it. In both instances the user's intent is to open or save a file, and the option further clarifies the format(s) that are to be considered / used. Inkscape almost has this now, in that it has a "file type" field which has "All inkscape files" etc., and it has "Inkscape SVG *.svg", but it doesn't have "Inkscape SVG (native format) *.svg". That is, the end user has to know that SVG is the native format, it isn't spelled out anywhere. We all know that, however, I suspect many of the end users don't think of SVG that way. Many of them probably think of Inkscape as a drawing program and do not concern themselves much with the file formats.
My other problem in this arena concerns "open". By symmetry if other formats must go out through "export" then they should come in through "import", rather than "open". However "import" is not a common option, and when it does appear, it often means "open this file into the current drawing/document" and not "open this other _type_ of file". The former is the current meaning in Inkscape.
Rather than fighting about this endlessly, it would probably be best to provide a user configurable switch that sets things up however the end user wants, so that everybody can be happy the UI on their machine, and they don't have to live with somebody else's view of how it should be. Something along the lines of:
INKSCAPE_SAVE_MODE: promiscuous: save works on all file types with no "special" status other than that the first time default is inkscape svg. It always opens to the last save file type. This is what we have now. conservative: save always opens with "Inkscape SVG (native format) *.svg" selected, but other file formats can still be selected. segregated: save is Inkscape SVG only (plus any other completely lossless formats, of which I think there are probably none), export is used for all other (lossy) formats.
I'm not wedded to those terms, they are just suggestions.
It would be good if that switch was also configurable from within the save/export dialogs, because many of the end users would really prefer one or the other of these, but they may not be sophisticated enough to find and modify the configuration file.
Regards,
David Mathog mathog@...1176... Manager, Sequence Analysis Facility, Biology Division, Caltech