On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 12:22:54PM +0100, jiho wrote:
I was about to report my "experience" in using Inkscape for the production of scientific illustrations. Now appears to be a good time. Sorry its a long email...
Hi Jiho!
So first of all: it mostly works just great! Inkscape allowed me go completely open source in my scientific workflow (**see below) and
Very cool, I love seeing how Inkscape has grown from being "just" an art tool for making icons, to doing full portrait illustrations, posters, presentations, paint patterns for aircraft, and now even becoming useful to scientists. :-)
produce more easily illustrations which look as good or even better that what I used to do with illustrator. But... everything can be better, isn't it? So here are my problems/suggestions/... I tried to put them in decreasing order of importance.
1/ The bigger problem is probably that few scientific softwares produce plots in SVG (damn, why is that?!). They all export EPS and
This is probably because SVG is a fairly new standard, and not widely adopted yet. You could probably make a long term impact here quite easily by taking an afternoon and writing to each of these companies with a request to support SVG in a future version of their software.
the first problem is to get these EPS in Inkscape. At least on OS X, EPS import does not work because Inkscape cannot find pstoedit or ghostscript, though they are installed from fink. Where does inkscape takes the PATH from? With my fink tree added to the PATH in .bashrc or .profile in my home (.profile is the default) it does not work. With uberconverter on the way I hope all this will be solved in a not- so-far-away future.
The path stuff in Inkscape is a bit limited; it works sufficiently on linux but I'd have been surprised if it worked out of the box on OSX. I think it still doesn't work reliably on Windows.
If you'd like to dig into this problem, here are a couple starting points.
First, there is a directory where config files for the extensions are located. On Linux this is in /usr/share/inkscape/extensions. These don't include path info but you may find it illuminating to review their settings and so forth.
Second, the paths are set in the src/path-prefix.h file. There is a section for ENABLE_OSX_APP_LOCATIONS. If I were you, my first step would be to verify that this define is actually set correctly on your machine. If it is, then also doublecheck that the paths match up to what you have on your system.
Third, there is a little bit of path manipulation going on in src/main.cpp in the main() routine. See line 610 for instance, where the current homedir is set for WIN32. I don't see any OSX specific hacks there though.
2/ After some pstoedit command line stuff a second problem arises: all files converted this way are displayed fine in Inkscape but behave strangely: any new element is enormous, no dashes can be applied to existing strokes... This is all related to some strange transformation matrices. And some magic (from my point of view at least): copy-pasting all elements in a new document solves everything. Is there a reason why what is done when copying and pasting should not be done when opening the file?
You might browse through the XML editor or the SVG source for the original doc and see what parameters didn't get carried along in the cut-and-paste. Possibly the conversion process tweaked that parameter, leading to those problems.
The best solution would be to figure out which tool is introducing the breakage and fixing it, but if you can identify what parameter is getting mis-set, an easy workaround would be to write a little sed script to reset that to something sane, and include that in your conversion procedure.
3/ I found the Open/Save As/ menus not optimal.
[Interesting suggestions, I don't have any comments to add]
4/ Well real PDF export would be great, for nice keynote talks with beautiful transparency effects and all... Everybody knows. RFE: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/? group_id=93438&atid=604309&func=detail&aid=864260
Yes, this has been requested over and over and over... The hurdle we have to get across is to find a programmer to do the work of implementing it. We even have a few fairly good design ideas of how to achieve this, next we just need to see some folks with an interest in working on it.
I personally don't have much need for this feature, but I'd be willing to help get things started, if someone else would be able to take the lead on the actual development work. I know roughly what would need to be done to get the work organized, and would be more than happy to share the info.
5/ Arrows are important and svg markers are great. They could be even better if they followed the style of the stroke they are applied to.
Yes, this is something I am personally interested in working on. I've dug into the code and know exactly what needs to be coded; I just haven't had a good solid stretch of freetime to work on it. (The test harness has been a higher priority.) Again, if someone else would like to get involved in doing some C++ coding deep in Inkscape's guts, I'd be more than happy to share my notes and help get you started. If no one else does, I'll get to this eventually, but be patient as it may be a while...
6/ Text on path is good but, here again, the ability to displace the text along the path would make it much more valuable.
7/ Node snapping is the way to go for precise work. Nevertheless, it would be handy to have an option to put stroke inside or outside a shape (which is currently only partially feasible by snapping bounding boxes). But apparently it sound difficult in SVG.
Yeah I'd find that useful myself, good idea.
8/ "Font find and replace" would be a valuable addition to the Text and Font dialog. Sometimes you just get busted by a journal who wanted helvetica and times only and want to resubmit quickly to an other one who wants geneva and times new roman... RFE: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php? func=detail&aid=1365463&group_id=93438&atid=604309
9/ Latex typesetting would be awesome (typesetting not graphical editing which seems impossible).
Yup.
10/ The "Grid" effect is useful but why is it limited to a maximum of 10 pixels grid squares? (in addition the unit is not displayed in the effect's dialog).
Are you sure? Can't this be controlled via File > Document Preferences > Grid ?
I'm always fiddling with the grid settings...
(Fwiw, I think the default grid settings are lame, and should be set to something more immediately useful. I'm sure this'd be an easy thing to change, I've just been too lazy to try to figure out what the best defaults would be.)
** For those who still have time to loose after this long email, here is a (confidential because not already published) draft of my article: "Movement analysis routine and circular statistics using free software". All vector illustrations are made with Inkscape. With such a title it would have been a shame to use something else that free software to write and illustrate the article!!! http://jo.irisson.free.fr/dropbox/inkscape/draft.pdf
Nice!
Bryce