11 марта 2015 г. 13:43 "LucaDC" wrote:

> > In other words, you don't use:
> >
> > - digital audio workstations;
> > - non-linear video editors;
> > - visual effects compositors;
> > - 3D authoring applications;
> > - 2D bitmap and vector animation apps.
>
> Well, not all of them. So what?

Let's not allow the conversation degrade to "so, what?", shall we? :)

> The point is: do you feel these are the most
> widely spread pieces of software that most people use?

That is simply _not_ the point. My feelings are irrelevant. Inkscape shouldn't do what _someone feels_ is right. Inkscape should do what _is_ right. And that involves analysis and UX design.

For starters, you would need to define, what audience Inkscape should try to serve in the first place.

You can't say "we want everyone" (well, you can, but it makes no sense), because then every time you design a new feature, you would have to go for the common denominator, which is someone who got his/her first laptop yesterday and has very little idea about anything. You can't design UI/UX that is great for both novices and professionals, both map makers and desktop publishing folks etc. You can make it great for a few groups of users and more or less bearable for others.

> Can you say for sure
> that these are a good reference for what the largest part of Inkscape's
> users in general expect?

No, and neither can you. There was no study, see?

In my experience listening to feedback from GIMP users after the v2.8 release, people who complained the least were people who GIMP has been targeting in the first place: people who work on challenging tasks and, by nature of their work, need to save XCF files (to retain layers etc.) to go back and edit them later. People who complained the most were people who either used GIMP for quick editing (for which GIMP is like a hammer to a bolt in the absense of a screwdriver) or were so sure they would never make a mistake that they would rather blindly click OK in the "Not safe to save to this lossy file format" and then close without saving to XCF.

And that's also another perspective on defining your audience: do you expect them to go back and polish their work, or do you expect them to mostly do quick edits of arbitrary file formats?

> I think that this argument deserves a real and serious discussion about what
> it really means saving your document in a different format and what it means
> exporting your document in a different format. It's not just a matter of
> personal taste, neither a mission to preserve superficial users from wasting
> their work.

Exactly my point :)

> It's clear that saving a PDF will cause the loss of some properties of the
> document, as there's not a 1:1 correspondence between (Inkscape's) SVG and
> PDF, and it's even worse with other formats. That's why putting a
> delimitation line between which formats can be "saved as" and which should
> be "exported to" is not a trivial issue.

Again, we agree here.

> IMHO, having Inkscape saving only in Inkscape's SVG format and exporting in
> everything else, hence putting PDFs and PNGs at the same level, would be a
> wrong decision.

It also depends on how you define Inkscape. Is it a generic vector graphics editor where file formats are treated equally? Or is it more of an SVG editor, with *some* support for other file formats?

Alex