On Dec 31, 2009, at 12:05 AM, Jon Cruz wrote:
... and speaking of command-line. I think that's the place for Alex to look. (next mail coming soon)
So... checking on the command-line help, I noticed one command that looks promising:
-a, --export-area=x0:y0:x1:y1 Exported area in SVG user units (default is the page; 0,0 is lower-left corner)
That one takes four parameters that are coordinates. Could easily take four that were page margins, etc.
So, I did a search on the codebase for that string. I found hits in only main.cpp:
c$ find . -name '*.cpp' -exec grep -H 'export-area' {} ; ./main.cpp: {"export-area", 'a', ./main.cpp: {"export-area-drawing", 'D', ./main.cpp: {"export-area-page", 'C', ./main.cpp: {"export-area-snap", 0, ./main.cpp: || !strncmp(argv[i], "--export-area-drawing", 21) ./main.cpp: || !strncmp(argv[i], "--export-area-page", 18) ./main.cpp: g_warning ("--export-use-hints can only be used with --export-id or --export-area-drawing; ignored."); ./main.cpp: g_warning ("You cannot use --export-area-page and --export-area-drawing at the same time; only the former will take effect."); ./main.cpp: g_warning ("EPS cannot have its bounding box extend beyond its content, so if your drawing is smaller than the page, --export-area-page will
Chasing that one with ""'s down, I see {"export-area", 'a', POPT_ARG_STRING, &sp_export_area, SP_ARG_EXPORT_AREA,
Aha! That tells us it is using the library support for parsing command-line options in a consistent manner. The parameters then are stored in that sp_export_area variable.
Doing a search, it can be seen as defined in main.cpp as static gchar *sp_export_area = NULL;
Uh oh. We see a bit of "evilness" sneak in where it is reinitialized: static void resetCommandlineGlobals() {
That's not so good, since global variables are in general not such a good thing. But we can ignore that for now...
Down in sp_do_export_png, we see that the string is parsed, used to set "area" which is in turn used to actually do the export of the image right there.
:-(
So it appears to not use the verb mechanism at all. Which means we're stuck for a "pretty" solution right off hand. Perhaps we will need to see how the DBus work is leveraging things.
So, Alex, what I think this shows is that you're not missing something obvious. However, Inkscape's internals appear to be, and really need to have that fixed.