Hi,
I have been working with Inkscape in the past on a spare-time single-user basis. Now I started to look into using it for producing graphics in a collaborative environment and I ran into some problems. I'm looking at SVG because it is a standardized and flexible format. More to the point, it is text-based, which makes it so much easier to work with in terms of version control and simultaneous editing.
The following discussion concerns Inkscape 0.48 on Windows.
I noticed that my window layout, among other things, is being saved by default to the Inkscape SVG file. As, this is not a good thing when collaborating with other people, because everyone will mess up each others environment, I tried to turn it off in the Preferences. Then I couldn't get the "Windows -> Remember and use last window's geometry" option to work. When I turned it on, the window layout was still being saved to (and loaded from) the SVG file. Only when I choose the "Don't save the window geometry" option was the saving omitted from the file. This seems like a bug, and I couldn't find it in the issue tracker. I would like to discuss some solutions.
One alternative is of course to make the current intended behavior work. This means that the "Remember and use last window's geometry" option should only save window layout info to user preferences, not to the file.
An alternative that I think makes more sense is to still save the layout along with each file (because different projects motivates different layouts), but to save them in a separate user settings file. So if I saved my foo.svg I would also get a foo.svg.user, or something similar. Actually I think all the attributes in the sodipodi:namedview tag could be moved out from the SVG to the user settings file, because they are all related to the work environment, and would differ from user to user. The benefit of having two files is that the user file can be excluded from version control and be kept locally for each user, while only committing changes to the actual SVG image.
Also, at the moment when using the option to save layout to the SVG file, changes to the layout does not mark the file as dirty. If I just change the window layout and press Save, nothing will be saved. I have to modify an object to make the file save-able for the layout to be saved.
What do you guys think?
Kind regards,
-- Staffan Einarsson