Clarification of supported image formats
There's a been a few people coming to inkscapeforum.com due to confusion over Inkscapes suggested support for various file formats and I was hoping someone might be able to clarify it for me.
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?
Thanks
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
Ted Gould wrote:
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.
Thankyou - that makes it much clearer.
Will an error for an extension be logged even if there is no Windows version of that extension? (i.e. just because it says you need an extension it doesn't mean it exists for Windows). And if a filetype is neither loaded nor logged then that filetype has no support at all?
On Sun, 2008-04-06 at 23:44 -0700, microUgly wrote:
Will an error for an extension be logged even if there is no Windows version of that extension? (i.e. just because it says you need an extension it doesn't mean it exists for Windows).
I don't believe that there are .inx files that are dropped in the windows packaging, but I'm unfamiliar with it. But the code will look through every INX file in the extensions directory and either include them or drop them with an error being printed.
And if a filetype is neither loaded nor logged then that filetype has no support at all?
Yes, unless someone has an external program that include inx files. There are a few of them out there, but honestly, I haven't kept that good of track on them. But it is safe to say that it isn't supported with the core download of Inkscape.
--Ted
On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 07:00:54AM -0700, Ted Gould wrote:
On Sun, 2008-04-06 at 23:44 -0700, microUgly wrote:
Will an error for an extension be logged even if there is no Windows version of that extension? (i.e. just because it says you need an extension it doesn't mean it exists for Windows).
I don't believe that there are .inx files that are dropped in the windows packaging, but I'm unfamiliar with it. But the code will look through every INX file in the extensions directory and either include them or drop them with an error being printed.
Actually, there are quite a few formats (Corel formats among others) that depend on the Uniconvertor (uniconv) to be installed in the system for one (and it is not distributed in the windows package) and then we don't even seem to have any proper dos shell scripts to invoke it.
There seem to be a bug relating to this issue:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/197617
I think this issue needs further investigation as some changes to the code will be inevitably required. I could look into it if there are no other volunteers :-) though some hints would be appreciated.
Regards, -- Marcin Floryan http://marcin.floryan.pl/ [GPG Key ID: 0D5581C5]
I hope this is not too much "off topic", but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have an installed Inkscape directory such as \data or \samples which would contain certified workable samples of various output formats such as .cdr, .wmf, etc. For example, one could take the file inkscape.logo.svg and convert it into different formats so people could test their file converters before filing a bug report. I have, on more than one occasion, filed a false bug report because I was using a test file that was obsolete or inappropriate. Also it would allow windows users to compare their experiences to non-windows users (perish the thought). Apart from that, however, I believe that uniconv will have some problems on win32 before it gets fully functional.
On Mon, 2008-04-07 at 19:23 -0400, Alvin Penner wrote:
I hope this is not too much "off topic", but I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have an installed Inkscape directory such as \data or \samples which would contain certified workable samples of various output formats such as .cdr, .wmf, etc. For example, one could take the file inkscape.logo.svg and convert it into different formats so people could test their file converters before filing a bug report. I have, on more than one occasion, filed a false bug report because I was using a test file that was obsolete or inappropriate. Also it would allow windows users to compare their experiences to non-windows users (perish the thought).
We have the test files repository in SVN, but I don't think it makes much sense to ship that to everyone:
http://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/inkscape/inkscape_testfiles/trunk...
--Ted
On Mon, 2008-04-07 at 17:04 +0200, Marcin Floryan wrote:
There seem to be a bug relating to this issue:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/197617
I think this issue needs further investigation as some changes to the code will be inevitably required. I could look into it if there are no other volunteers :-) though some hints would be appreciated.
Heh, writing batch files on Windows is not my cup of tea. Good luck!
--Ted
On Mon, Apr 07, 2008 at 07:29:28PM -0700, Ted Gould wrote:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/197617
I think this issue needs further investigation as some changes to the code will be inevitably required. I could look into it if there are no other volunteers :-) though some hints would be appreciated.
Heh, writing batch files on Windows is not my cup of tea. Good luck!
I am confident enough with writing batch files. It is the invocation in Inkscape that I am more concerned about since it does not seem to cater for batch files under Windows at the moment.Also it would be nice if we could agree on how to 'search' for requisites - Maybe we could allow the users to specify a path to executables in Windows?
Regards, -- Marcin Floryan http://marcin.floryan.pl/ [GPG Key ID: 0D5581C5]
Hi Marcin,
I am pretty sure that there's a working version of uniconverter for windows, so it would probably just be a matter of figuring out an .inx file by copying from one of the existing ones for other helper programs.
Rygle.
Marcin Floryan-3 wrote:
I am confident enough with writing batch files. It is the invocation in Inkscape that I am more concerned about since it does not seem to cater for batch files under Windows at the moment.Also it would be nice if we could agree on how to 'search' for requisites - Maybe we could allow the users to specify a path to executables in Windows?
There is some further discussion at launchpad bug 197617 and also 201630
Alvin
I am pretty sure that there's a working version of uniconverter for windows, so it would probably just be a matter of figuring out an .inx file by copying from one of the existing ones for other helper programs.
Rygle.
Thanks again, Ted.
This is what I'm posting as a sticky on the forum - but feel free to correct me since I don't have the best understanding of this:
Inkscape relies on extensions for many of the file formats it can open and save. If a required dependency is not installed on your PC then Inkscape will not load the filetype extension and the filetype will not be listed in the save or open dialogs.
If you do not have the option to save or open a particular filetype in Inkscape, check the extension-errors.log file (~/.inkscape/extension-errors.log for Linux or %userprofile%\Application Data\Inkscape\extension-errors.log for Windows) for details about what dependency was not met for the filetype.
For example, I cannot save AI files and this is was extension-errors.log says: [code]Extension "AI 8.0 Output" failed to load because a dependency was not met. Dependency: type: executable location: path string: gs[/code] This means Ghostscript (gs) is required and cannot be found. This may mean Ghostscript is not installed, or it's path is not be in the PATH environment variable.
Note that a required dependency may not be available for your platform (i.e. some dependencies might be available for Linux but not Windows). Also, if a filetype is not listed in Inkscapes save or open dialog and also not mentioned in extension-errors.log then it isn't supported.
That looks good to me. Thanks for writing this up!
--Ted
On Mon, 2008-04-07 at 17:38 -0700, microUgly wrote:
Thanks again, Ted.
This is what I'm posting as a sticky on the forum - but feel free to correct me since I don't have the best understanding of this:
Inkscape relies on extensions for many of the file formats it can open and save. If a required dependency is not installed on your PC then Inkscape will not load the filetype extension and the filetype will not be listed in the save or open dialogs.
If you do not have the option to save or open a particular filetype in Inkscape, check the extension-errors.log file (~/.inkscape/extension-errors.log for Linux or %userprofile%\Application Data\Inkscape\extension-errors.log for Windows) for details about what dependency was not met for the filetype.
For example, I cannot save AI files and this is was extension-errors.log says: [code]Extension "AI 8.0 Output" failed to load because a dependency was not met. Dependency: type: executable location: path string: gs[/code] This means Ghostscript (gs) is required and cannot be found. This may mean Ghostscript is not installed, or it's path is not be in the PATH environment variable.
Note that a required dependency may not be available for your platform (i.e. some dependencies might be available for Linux but not Windows). Also, if a filetype is not listed in Inkscapes save or open dialog and also not mentioned in extension-errors.log then it isn't supported.
participants (5)
-
Alvin Penner -
Marcin Floryan -
microUgly -
rygle -
Ted Gould