Hi,
Can't "Export bitmap" be turned into "Export", offering a choice of bitmaps, and remembering the chosen filename?
"Export bitmap" has a lot of bitmap-specific options, so I don't think we can combine it easily with vector export. However I do agree that "Save as" is not the most logical place to look up for EPS export. Perhaps we should separate that into an "Export vector" command.
I am still following this list although I am not a developper at all and maybe all this discussion will be more suited in the users or testers mailing list but still... here are my 2 cents.
On this particular issue, I think that many other popular applications do the wrong thing. For example, in Adobe Illustrator you can save as EPS, PDF, AI, SVG. As Gavin I think that "Saving as..." should provide you with a complete and editable file and I think that this is the basic idea of any user. But then, depending on the save options you can end with a non editable PDF file, or a file without transparency (EPS) and so on. To go a little further on this topic, something that I find even more confusing is that you what you see when you work on the file is not what is saved. For example you can create a new file (foo.ai), create some gradients, transparent shapes and then save it as EPS. Nothing changes in your editing window except that the file name in the title bar is foo.eps even though this format does not support transparency. Then you save it (in EPS) and only when you try to quit a warning message tells you that you might loose something in your document (and as a newbie, you have no idea what). So why not saying/showing that earlier! In addition, if you are confident in your "save as" dialog you might just save the file anyway and loose all your nice gradients just because the menu is not well organized. And the orignal foo.ai does not help you so much because you have done most of you editing on the EPS file.
From a programming point of view I understand this behaviour: the
image you work on is what is in memory not what is saved on the disc. But I think that, from a user point of view it will be much better to see immediatly what saving is EPS makes you loose (and make this undoable of course). For example you might have to provide some EPS illustrations for an article you are writing, you notice that illustrator or inkscape can provide you with these EPS and you start editing your nice EPS files with lots of gradients, transparency... which end up in a mess because you didn't knew about the limitations of EPS. Exactly the same happens with the Photoshop when you save a multi-layer fille to JPEG, and still keep you multiple layers in the editing window. And there are many other examples...
To sum up (I apologize for all this beeing a bit long) I support Gavin and think that "save as" or "save a copy as" should save to format in which no information is lost and that everything else should be "export". From a user point of view I think this is more self-explanatory because it makes you to consider two different files: the original where all the information is and the exported one where you can imagine that some information is lost, and more secure because you still have the original one where you made all the editing.
For the organization of the export dialog, three dialogs seem a little to many for me, especially in this situation. Exporting make you loose information so you might what to check quite often what your SVG will look like when exported. Too many dialogs will make the export a little painfull. But then one unique dialog for bitmap and vector might be confusing too because the options are very different, as previously said. Furthermore, making a clear distinction between vector and bitmap will be great for teaching the user that there is a difference (I still hear many people that don't really understand why their JPEG print so badly while my PDF look great). If you don't what to add too many menu items (two exports) the solution could be a tabbed Export window with a "bitmap" tab and a "vector" tab. In each one the user can set the options and the filename and the options of the two tabs will be remembered (as it is the currently the case with the bitmap export) so that exporting several times your document during the editing process will just be a matter of clicking OK or clicking a tab and then OK.
I hope this was not too long but I think that if Inkscape, in addition of beeing a great software, could teach good image editing practices to its newbie users it would be a great "advantage" in comparison with other big softwares aimed at professional graphic designers (but used anyway by everybody so that the results are not always great ;-) )
Thanks again for this software.