Hi all,
I sort of disappeared after last year's SoC was over, but some of you might remember me. I'm a student pursuing an MSc degree in Computer Science from Hungary who contributed to Inkscape with SoC working on the Cairo-based PDF exporter(s). My 'disapperance' was mainly because of an overloaded schedule at the university and because of other activities. I apologize for this. Looking back now I know that developing the native PDF export extension into a full-blown one would've been a better approach because with that now Inkscape wouldn't have to wait for Cairo to get decent PDF export capabilities. Of course, in the long term, the integration with Cairo is a good thing. But I'm glad that the work on Cairo's PDF backend went in the direction I was investigating. Now thanks to Adrian Johnson transparent gradients are supported in Cairo (fortunately he could make good use of my previous patch). Rendering of groups is a bigger issue since that would need a reorganization of how the PDF backend's functions now work (especially the stream handling functions). I wrote proof of concept code for this at the end of last summer but there wasn't enough time to polish it into a full solution because of the involved deeper modifications to the backend. Now, building on the experience I gained last summer, I would be happy to work on PDF import for Inkscape taking part in this year's SoC. My approach would be to use Poppler for parsing the PDF document and then generate Inkscape's representation in memory from an output device. Other solution would be to use Cairo's SVG backend to generate the SVG file from the PDF document using Poppler and import it with sp_document_new_from_mem. Though I doubt that this would yield good quality results. I can't see a mentor mentioned for this project idea in the wiki. So who would be the mentor for this project? The obvious advantage of this project compared to last summer's Cairo PDF export project is that regarding development it wouldn't depend on any external libraries so it could be actually done in three months. Please follow up with your comments regarding the PDF import issue.
Best regards, miklos