Am Sonntag, den 15.10.2006, 00:11 -0600 schrieb Michael Moore:
I think it'd be great if it were possible to select "Import clipart" in the Inkscape menu, and there was a nice clipart browser that would pop up to let you view the clipart by category, see thumbnails, and select a piece of clipart to import into your drawing. As I'm thinking about this, I'm thinking specificly of OCAL.
What do people think?
Great idea.
Here's what I was thinking...
The GUI would have a two panes, a Cancel and an OK button.
Look into the Gnome or Apple HIG, OK Buttons are out call it Imort or Insert. ;)
The left pane would be an expandable tree view of the OCAL categories. You could expand a category to view the sub categories. The right pane would display thumbnails of the clipart in the selected category (and it's sub categories?). The user would select a thumbnail, then click "OK" to insert it.
I hope you know, that openclipart.org is moving to ccHost http://openclipart.org/cchost/ I think there is some RSS fun possible. And I would not think in category but more in tags, because one clipart can be in more then one category/have more then on tag.
Since rendering all of the SVG cliparts in each category would take too long, I would use the png thumbnails already in OCAL.
Is that really faster? And if yes, can't you just render the cliparts that are displayed
So as not to be reading through all the OCAL collection each time you want to import, the categories and thumbnails listings would be read from an XML file. I would write a script or plugin to generate the appropriate XML file, and if this works out nicely, maybe OCAL would be able to include the XML file in the download.
The plan is to create custom download packages via ccHost but there is still some PHP hacking needed. So all PHP hackers here please go to openclipart.org and ask where help is needed.
Thoughts?
Have a lot of fun Tobias