On Sat, 2004-04-17 at 02:14, Ted Gould wrote:
Bitmap export has a switch for this on the export dialog. It's pretty convenient. If we implement exporting a selection into a vector format, it should be similar IMHO.
I like that way too, but I just don't know how to make it work with how I'm thinking about things. I'd like to keep the preferences for the save and the type of save that you're doing separate. The reason for this is to allow more flexibility for the extension that would be implementing the export.
Now, how to do it... or, I guess, is that a worthwhile goal? I don't really want to have two dialogs - that would suck. I could see two menu items, but that seems a touch confusing (and perhaps harder to translate?).
IMO, the format-specific options belong in the save dialog alongside the generic save options.
One of the reasons for this is so users can select an output format from the dropdown and immediately know what their options are upfront (and depending on what those are, they might want to pick a different one). We want to facilitate user exploration.
Since we don't want to constrain an extension's UI (or choice of toolkits) unnecessarily, perhaps the best way to achieve this would be to provide a GtkSocket (http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/gtk/GtkSocket.html) in the save dialog in which the currently selected extension can embed its preferences window.
However, in the specific case of exporting/saving a selection, it might make sense to have separate menuitems on the Edit menu to select that behavior. "Copy to file..." ?
Similarly for importing a file to be embedded the current document -- applications often call that feature "place", which translates the same as "paste" in many languages. "Paste from file..." ?
-mental