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?
I'd like to implement this, but I wanted to get some input first. I'm not new to programming, but I haven't done much with GUIs, and nothing with GTK.
Here's what I was thinking...
The GUI would have a two panes, a Cancel and an OK button. 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.
Since rendering all of the SVG cliparts in each category would take too long, I would use the png thumbnails already in OCAL.
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.
This next part should be read with the disclaimer that this is how it would work if I'm understanding the Inkscape source correctly...
I would create a new verb SP_VERB_FILE_IMPORT_CLIPART, and a new menu item "Import Clipart". When it was chosen, it would call sp_clipart_file_import instead of sp_file_import like the current Import does. The sp_clipart_file_import would open the dialog I described above, and call file_import like the current Import method does. Essentially it would do the exact same job that Import does now, but with a GUI that is friendly for browsing clipart.
Thoughts?