On Sun, 2008-04-06 at 22:39 -0700, microUgly wrote:
Some release announcements for 0.46 says that it supports importing EPS files, and on the Wiki it's states it can "natively" save as AI - both appear to be incorrect for the Windows platform, and it looks like it might be true under Linux only through the use of third-party software.
Is it safe to say that if filetype is not listed in the save/open dialog then it's not 'natively' supported, for the respective operation, despite what is stated on some sources?
Well, we're going to start getting into some tricky words here as we start to discuss this.
The only format Inkscape natively supports is SVG.
Through extensions we support many other formats. Some of these are extensions that get compiled in (PDF import for instance) and some of these are done via scripting where external utilities are called.
For the extensions that are compiled in, they are usually dependent on a library being available. So, if who ever built the binary didn't have that library, Inkscape won't support that format. Good examples are needing libpoppler for PDF or libwpg for wpg graphics.
The scripting based extensions are more dynamic in that they will look for dependencies every time that Inkscape is run to see if they can activate. But, this means that depending on what the user has installed, they will see different extensions as being available. You can see an error log of which dependencies were failed by looking at ~/.inkscape/extension-errors.log which also, in many cases, provides information on satisfying those dependencies.
Hope that helps, Ted