On Wed, 2014-04-02 at 13:06 +1100, Bernard Gray wrote:
I'd be keen to hear people's thoughts, and I realise this may be better as two separate discussions. My programming skills are fairly atrophied these days, but I would definitely consider having a crack at patching something. Paying for the features either in the form of a project donation or by specifically hiring resources are also possibilities.
Hi Bernard,
I think the solution might be to think of inkscape as the template creator and renderer.
So one can run inkscape from a script or command line in order to turn any svg into a pdf. This is useful for keeping things in svg until the last part of the process and you can automate this. I've seen solutions that watch a directory for svg files and render pdf files automatically.
The other option is to print to pdf. Not sure if it's the same for inkscape's renderer or not though.
For data entry. i.e. fixed fields. We could do more work there for sure. We don't really have a way of specifiying parts of a document which are configurable and parts that aren't. I don't think SVG2 is going in that direction either (please surprise me with a correction Tav)
Overall I think the work might be done with smaller scripts. Although we'd certainly appreciate the investment in inkscape to improve the save and export design. In my designs, save would be for any file. It would default and prioritise svg/plain svg etc, but if you selected pdf or png it would open the export dialog setting that file. Making it a two entry flow rather than two single flows.
There's little reason to consider pdf options and png options to be somehow different.
Best Regards, Martin Owens