Alexandre Prokoudine 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? The point is: do you feel these are the most widely spread pieces of software that most people use? Can you say for sure that these are a good reference for what the largest part of Inkscape's users in general expect?
Anyway, just for completeness, I do use programs that implement the separate saving and export paradigm but there's no point in listing them here because...
Alexandre Prokoudine wrote
We can go on discussing it like this forever :)
this is exactly one of the point I wanted to rise with my previous post, and I'm referring to the "like this" part as I hope that the constructive part of the discussion will go on. Another point was that what people find "logic" is usually simply what they are used to. And we are not all used to the same things (well, fortunately, let me say). :)
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. Also, being opening and saving basic operations that almost all softwares implement, it's wrong to consider what people expect just as an annoying constraint to be taken into consideration, so better ignore it (as I've read around about and just wanted to contradict). I suppose that everybody has an opinion on what 'open' and 'save' and 'save as' do or should do; I think that less people have about what 'export' do or should do and very few about 'save a copy'. And their opinions come, for sure, from the experience they've had with how these operations have been implemented in the pieces of software they use. Please, don't forget or try to ignore the "Principle of least astonishment".
Now, let me expose my <opinion> Personally, with the experience I've had with different softwares in different fields, I've developed the idea that if you "save as" you get a document that you can later reopen and edit without losing the peculiarities that the software you're using has; while if you export you somehow "translate" your work in something that cannot be easily taken back to the "intrinsic form" it had before the export from the point of view of the software. To be more explicit: if I save an Inkscape's SVG into PDF, I'll still be able to open it and edit it with Inkscape as its vectorial nature has been preserved; but if I export it to a PNG I'll no longer be able to open and edit it with Inkscape: I could still import it as a bitmap image in Inkscape but the vectorial form has gone and I cannot change the radius of that circle or the color of that transparent star with Inkscape's tools anymore. 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. And it strictly depends on the nature of the software we're dealing with. Consider a word processor: if you save as text you lose all formatting, but you can still reopen the text and edit it and apply another formatting as you need; sometimes this is even convenient. I wouldn't be too much purist nor conservative about which particular features could be lost when saving to a different format: this should be up to the user that chooses a format because he needs it, not because he's too stupid to know what he's doing. I think that what should be preserved is the big picture of the software's purpose. And, anyway, the already implemented "lossy save" warning is protective enough to me.
Personally, in a word processor I expect to find the ".txt" extension under the "Save as..." dialog. At the same time, in a word processor I expect the ".pdf" extension under the "Export..." dialog, because once the document is saved as PDF I'll no longer be able to open it with the word processor to edit it. (Of course, this is not true for a word processor that can seamlessly open and save PDF files: apply the next paragraph to it). Personally, in Inkscape I expect to find the ".pdf" extension under the "Save as..." dialog. At the same time, in Inkscape I expect the ".png" extension under the "Export..." dialog, because once the document is saved as PNG I'll no longer be able to open it with Inkscape to edit it. (Of course, this is not entirely true for, as an example, a multipage PDF, as Inkscape cannot autonomously deal with it; or even simply for a purely textual PDF given that Inkscape's abilities to deal with text are not (yet) up to a word processor).
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.
These are only my thoughts. I'd be glad to hear also others'. </opinion>
Luca
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