These are a few reasons why, from the outside, I think it makes sense for Inkscape to adopt UberConverter (UC) and not to 'hard-wire' each new filter, such as PDF export, directly into Inkscape.
* If you write ONE filter to talk to uber-converter then you get ALL file types it supports. * Each new filter type that's added to UberConverter, Inkscape will be able to use with NO additional work * Each new filter type that UC supports benefits at least two open source projects, and possibly more. So immediately it avoids re-inventing the wheel and duplicating effort (surely one of the core principles of FOSS) * Developers can write new import / export filters without having to know anything about the internal code of Inkscape or Xara. It's thus, hopefully, considerably easier to write new filters for Inkscape and Xara.
In a nutshell UC works by having one master 'uber-format' that's a superset, as much as possible, of all common vector standards. This is the hub-format. You write one filter to convert to and from that format. UC then has lots of separate independent plug-in filters to convert to and from this hub format. So now if you add say, a DXF converter into the hub, all others types can be converted to and from DXF. The goal is to have, as much as possible, a lossless conversion between types and to retain important meta information such as group structure.
No other platform has an agreed open standard for vector conversion (commercial considerations make it difficult to imagine), but the benefit to the FOSS platform of having one solution for all products wanting vector conversion seems to be very considerable.
And finally, we (Xara and Inkscape) have spoken about ways to cooperate, to avoid competing, and it seems this is a classic example where with a little planning we can do just that: cooperate, not compete. We all have limited developer resources and so immediately the benefits of our two projects pooling to solve the same problem once strikes me as a huge gain. And if a third project, say Scribus, started to use UC, then for each filter, or even each little minor improvement, three major projects get the immediate benefit. A 300% return on your developer investment.
We both require PDF export. Recently there's been discussion about ODG support and EMF/WMF. These are important vector standard file formats. It would obviously benefit both our projects to have EPS support, CorelDRAW CDR and CMX support, Adobe Illustrator - I could go on. Let's solve the problem once.
Now having said that it's early days for UC. It's a mostly a plan, not a fully functioning reality. But right now we're putting a lot of effort into integrating UC into XaraLX, and we hope within a few weeks to have this working and demonstrating the first UC filter (Xar <-> SVG). And yes this means if you guys integrate this you get the ability to read and write our .xar files.
So I think Eric's project deserves Inkscape's support. It even seems a good candidate for SoC support since it's an independent project that directly benefits multiple other projects.
Charles
-----Original Message----- From: inkscape-devel-admin@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:inkscape-devel-admin@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Eric Wilhelm Sent: 26 April 2006 22:59 To: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Cc: bulia byak Subject: [Inkscape-devel] Re: vectorsection vs native PDF?
# from bulia byak # on Friday 14 April 2006 05:53 pm:
- Implement
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Required_PDF_Support (I know
of UberConverter, but PDF is the most important interchange
format so
we should better support it natively)
bulia, can you explain why this needs to be native? Short of animation and the exact placement of things like transforms in the DOM (if pdf would even allow that) the Chromista hub should express enough of the SVG structure to round-trip PDF conversions as well as anything native.
If it gets implemented natively in inkscape, I would just use that as a hub attached to chromista to get things like xar -> pdf, but going through svg is going to be lossy from that perspective.
Thanks, Eric -- Peer's Law: The solution to the problem changes the problem.
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