Hi,
The current PostScript input extensions are dependent on the skconvert utility (it uses pstoedit -f sk to produce sketch format), itself part of Skencil, a "competing" (? :-) ) vector drawing project.
As the Fedora inkscape maintainer, this dependency is somewhat problematic. From a distribution/packaging perspective, it is difficult to justify a hard dependency between inkscape and skencil as skencil is itself another desktop application and also fairly large. It is also somewhat non-intuitive and confusing to the end-user (and as a side-note, skencil might be dropped eventually because it's still based on gtk1). Now, I would still like to have PostScript import work out of the box as that's a feature that was requested by several users.
So my questions: why the skconvert dependency ? Are there any alternatives ? pstoedit has many output formats (such as plot-svg using GNU libplot), is it possible to use a different one to achieve the same result ?
-denis
On 2006-December-02 , at 02:55 , Denis Leroy wrote:
Hi,
The current PostScript input extensions are dependent on the skconvert utility (it uses pstoedit -f sk to produce sketch format), itself part of Skencil, a "competing" (? :-) ) vector drawing project. [...] So my questions: why the skconvert dependency ? Are there any alternatives ? pstoedit has many output formats (such as plot-svg using GNU libplot), is it possible to use a different one to achieve the same result ?
I agree with you in the fact that depending on skencil for ps input is a too large dependency. I modified the input extension to use only pstoedit and it works correctly on my system. nevertheless, when I asked if this was a possible change, I was explained that the choice to use skencil was motivated by two facts: - pdf input was done by pdf > ps > skencil > svg and this gave better results that pdf > ps > svg via pstoedit (namely: it keeps text as text and does not convert it to shapes). this was explained by Bryce if I recall correctly. but this was tested a long time ago and from what I see now, there is no more pdf input extension... - the plot-svg device is not available in all releases of pstoedit. In particular previous versions of FC included an version which required to install a other package -plotutils I think- to get plot- svg and plotutils was not a required dependency of pstoedit. Things are the same on Debian Sarge. And there is no way to test for the availability of plot-svg from inside the input extension. Therefore, depending on pstoedit may not be sufficient to ensure ps input. once again this was based on some tests conducted a while ago, maybe plotutils is now integrated into pstoedit or always listed as a dependency.
I would recommend to: - test if the results are similar for eps and ps input (the only two input formats which depend on org.inkscape.input.ps now) with skconvert and pstoedit - collect information on which versions of pstoedit are shipped now and check if they include plot-svg what do others think?
I can tell you that the versions of pstoedit obtained via Fink or DarwinPorts on mac OS X both 10.3 and 10.4 (the two versions currently supported by Inkscape) works like a charm and includes plot- svg.
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
Hi! Thanks for the feedback.
jiho wrote:
- pdf input was done by pdf > ps > skencil > svg and this gave better
results that pdf > ps > svg via pstoedit (namely: it keeps text as text and does not convert it to shapes).
But isn't this only a matter on how the postscript is created (from pdf in your example) ? I had no issue on my side, as long as the postscript itself has a text section. You can also force pstoedit to never "draw fonts" with -ndf. I created my postscript example with dia. Note that dia can export to postscript in 2 ways: one of them involves pango and generates postscript with only vector data. In that case obviously, you can't expect pstoedit to 'OCR' the postscript and recreate a text section :-). Note that i'm no postscript or svg expert, so please correct me if i said something silly.
- the plot-svg device is not available in all releases of pstoedit. In
particular previous versions of FC included an version which required to install a other package -plotutils I think- to get plot-svg and plotutils was not a required dependency of pstoedit.
Well i also maintain pstoedit and plotutils so that makes it easier for me. Plotutils is present in Fedora since FC-5.
I would recommend to:
- test if the results are similar for eps and ps input (the only two
input formats which depend on org.inkscape.input.ps now) with skconvert and pstoedit
Ok i did that. I tried 2 alternative methods :
- using pstoedit plot-svg output. It works fine, but when I import the EPS onto inkscape, the created object is very very very small. Actually you can't even see it on screen, you have to select all and increase its size. Why would that be ? is it because of my dia-created EPS test file ?
- using fig as an intermediate step, using transfig. This is an easier dependency to work with as transfig is fairly small, even compared to plotutils. This also work, but now i have to opposite problem: the imported EPS is gigantic on the inkscape screen, i have to zoom out a bunch and scale it back. Pretty annoying.
- collect information on which versions of pstoedit are shipped now and
check if they include plot-svg
Since FC-5, we ship pstoedit 3.44 and plotutils 2.5, the latest versions available afaik.
On 2006-December-02 , at 17:20 , Denis Leroy wrote:
Hi! Thanks for the feedback.
jiho wrote:
- pdf input was done by pdf > ps > skencil > svg and this gave
better results that pdf > ps > svg via pstoedit (namely: it keeps text as text and does not convert it to shapes).
But isn't this only a matter on how the postscript is created (from pdf in your example) ? I had no issue on my side, as long as the postscript itself has a text section. You can also force pstoedit to never "draw fonts" with -ndf. I created my postscript example with dia. Note that dia can export to postscript in 2 ways: one of them involves pango and generates postscript with only vector data. In that case obviously, you can't expect pstoedit to 'OCR' the postscript and recreate a text section :-). Note that i'm no postscript or svg expert, so please correct me if i said something silly.
actually I don't really know about that, I was just repeating what was said on the list ;-) here is the original message: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=14122051
- the plot-svg device is not available in all releases of
pstoedit. In particular previous versions of FC included an version which required to install a other package -plotutils I think- to get plot-svg and plotutils was not a required dependency of pstoedit.
Well i also maintain pstoedit and plotutils so that makes it easier for me. Plotutils is present in Fedora since FC-5.
I would recommend to:
- test if the results are similar for eps and ps input (the only
two input formats which depend on org.inkscape.input.ps now) with skconvert and pstoedit
Ok i did that. I tried 2 alternative methods :
- using pstoedit plot-svg output. It works fine, but when I import
the EPS onto inkscape, the created object is very very very small. Actually you can't even see it on screen, you have to select all and increase its size. Why would that be ? is it because of my dia- created EPS test file ?
- using fig as an intermediate step, using transfig. This is an
easier dependency to work with as transfig is fairly small, even compared to plotutils. This also work, but now i have to opposite problem: the imported EPS is gigantic on the inkscape screen, i have to zoom out a bunch and scale it back. Pretty annoying.
I had "similar" problems when using pstoedit and some ps produced by scientific packages: Inkscape displayed the converted file correctly but anything I draw on it was huge and zooming produced strange results. From the little I investigated it was related to a zoom factor included in the svg by pstoedit. Copy-pasting the svg in a new Inkscape document solved the problem. Does this work for you too? As the svg was displayed fine it was not really a bug in pstoedit. Inkscape took the zoom factor into account so this was not a bug there either. If you can find a real zoom related bug this could be a good start to get this working correctly. I still have all the test files for my "bug".
- collect information on which versions of pstoedit are shipped
now and check if they include plot-svg
Since FC-5, we ship pstoedit 3.44 and plotutils 2.5, the latest versions available afaik.
OK, now for the rest of the distros ;-)
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
Were you able to get these issues sorted out? I did a quick check of the extensions and it appears the only use of skconvert is for the sk input extension.
Bryce
On Sat, Dec 02, 2006 at 07:43:18AM +0100, jiho wrote:
On 2006-December-02 , at 02:55 , Denis Leroy wrote:
The current PostScript input extensions are dependent on the skconvert utility (it uses pstoedit -f sk to produce sketch format), itself part of Skencil, a "competing" (? :-) ) vector drawing project. [...] So my questions: why the skconvert dependency ? Are there any alternatives ? pstoedit has many output formats (such as plot-svg using GNU libplot), is it possible to use a different one to achieve the same result ?
I agree with you in the fact that depending on skencil for ps input is a too large dependency. I modified the input extension to use only pstoedit and it works correctly on my system. nevertheless, when I asked if this was a possible change, I was explained that the choice to use skencil was motivated by two facts:
- pdf input was done by pdf > ps > skencil > svg and this gave better
results that pdf > ps > svg via pstoedit (namely: it keeps text as text and does not convert it to shapes). this was explained by Bryce if I recall correctly. but this was tested a long time ago and from what I see now, there is no more pdf input extension...
- the plot-svg device is not available in all releases of pstoedit.
In particular previous versions of FC included an version which required to install a other package -plotutils I think- to get plot- svg and plotutils was not a required dependency of pstoedit. Things are the same on Debian Sarge. And there is no way to test for the availability of plot-svg from inside the input extension. Therefore, depending on pstoedit may not be sufficient to ensure ps input. once again this was based on some tests conducted a while ago, maybe plotutils is now integrated into pstoedit or always listed as a dependency.
I would recommend to:
- test if the results are similar for eps and ps input (the only two
input formats which depend on org.inkscape.input.ps now) with skconvert and pstoedit
- collect information on which versions of pstoedit are shipped now
and check if they include plot-svg what do others think?
I can tell you that the versions of pstoedit obtained via Fink or DarwinPorts on mac OS X both 10.3 and 10.4 (the two versions currently supported by Inkscape) works like a charm and includes plot- svg.
JiHO
Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=D... _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
On 2007-January-04 , at 21:46 , Bryce Harrington wrote:
Were you able to get these issues sorted out?
As a reminder for everyone the issue to sort out was to replace skconvert by pstoedit in input extensions in order to remove the (large) dependency on skencil. This depended on the availability of the plot-svg backend in pstoedit, which is provided by an additional package (plotutils).
I cannot solve the problem on my own. This requires to: (1) get people with several different distros testing if plotutils is included as a dependency of pstoedit. as far: - OS X: Fink and DarwinPort are OK - FC-5 and 6 are OK - Debian stable (sarge) is not OK or (2) modify the input extension to issue a warning when plot-svg is not present. NB: this would also help the latex equation extension which only requires pstoedit but uses pstoedit with plot-svg or (3) explicitly include plotutils and pstoedit as inkscape dependencies.
IMHO (3) is both the best and simplest solution because pstoedit and plotutils are both quite small and very useful to people working with vector illustrations.
I did a quick check of the extensions and it appears the only use of skconvert is for the sk input extension.
do you mean the only extension *other* than the ps_input one? in my svn tree, updated right now, the ps extension still uses the sk input extension (so in the end it uses skencil). from what I gather: SK -sk_input (skencil)-> SVG PS -ps_input (pstoedit)-> SK -sk_input (skencil)-> SVG EPS -eps_input(ghostscript)-> PS -ps_input (pstoedit)-> SK -sk_input (skencil)-> SVG There does not seem to be a PDF input extension anymore.
I've made a patch for ps and eps input: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php? func=detail&aid=1629798&group_id=93438&atid=604308 from the description: This patch provides basic functionality but probably needs enhancements: - pstoedit ouputs a message with its version number to standard error and I cannot get rid of it. therefore opening a file in inkscape via the input extension always opens an error window even when there is no error. (example of this message: "pstoedit: version 3.40 / DLL interface 108 (build Jul 18 2006 - release build) : Copyright (C) 1993 - 2005 Wolfgang Glunz") - pstoedit conversion introduces a scale factor which makes Inkscape misbehave (zoom is broken, any newly drawn item is huge...). see http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/XML_Repair for details. this is sorted by copy/pasting the svg in a new inkscape document. it would be nice to do it directly withing the extension.
maybe sk_input could use pstoedit also. pstoedit can read sk files but the few I have tested here fail. It seems pstoedit uses sk->ps-
svg in this case.
cheers,
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
On 1/7/07, jiho <jo.irisson@...400...> wrote:
As a reminder for everyone the issue to sort out was to replace skconvert by pstoedit in input extensions in order to remove the (large) dependency on skencil. This depended on the availability of the plot-svg backend in pstoedit, which is provided by an additional package (plotutils).
Well, it's not exactly easy to figure that there's any connection at all between pstoedit and plotutils. The web site of plotutils never mentions pstoedit. The web site of pstoedit mentions plotutils once but not in connection with SVG; for SVG, it offers its own crippled shareware SVG back-end.
I installed pstoedit 3.33 and plotutils 2.4.1 from source but I don't see any way to make them work together. "pstoedit -f plot-svg" says "Unsupported driver plot-svg". Ideas?
On 1/7/07, bulia byak wrote:
I installed pstoedit 3.33 and plotutils 2.4.1 from source but I don't see any way to make them work together. "pstoedit -f plot-svg" says "Unsupported driver plot-svg". Ideas?
http://www.pstoedit.net/pstoedit
The following formats are available as additional plugins on a shareware basis. See http://www.pstoedit.net/plugins/ for more details.
* SVG - scalable vector format.
Alexandre
On 1/7/07, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote:
The following formats are available as additional plugins on a shareware basis. See http://www.pstoedit.net/plugins/ for more details.
* SVG - scalable vector format.
That's the crippled non-free one that we cannot use. It's "-f svg", not "-f plot-svg" that Jiho uses.
On Mon, 2007-01-08 at 01:21 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
On 1/7/07, bulia byak wrote:
I installed pstoedit 3.33 and plotutils 2.4.1 from source but I don't see any way to make them work together. "pstoedit -f plot-svg" says "Unsupported driver plot-svg". Ideas?
http://www.pstoedit.net/pstoedit
The following formats are available as additional plugins on a shareware basis. See http://www.pstoedit.net/plugins/ for more details.
* SVG - scalable vector format.
I suppose it's not very nice, but part of me wants to fork pstoedit and add a non-crippled SVG export.
-mental
On Sun, 2007-01-07 at 21:12 -0500, MenTaLguY wrote:
I suppose it's not very nice, but part of me wants to fork pstoedit and add a non-crippled SVG export.
Well, specifically, I think I'd like to take the postscript portion of pstoedit and wire that up with Ghostscript and some additional Postscript code to generate SVG directly. That's a bit less harsh than forking pstoedit per se.
-mental
On 1/8/07, MenTaLguY wrote:
On Sun, 2007-01-07 at 21:12 -0500, MenTaLguY wrote:
I suppose it's not very nice, but part of me wants to fork pstoedit and add a non-crippled SVG export.
Well, specifically, I think I'd like to take the postscript portion of pstoedit and wire that up with Ghostscript and some additional Postscript code to generate SVG directly. That's a bit less harsh than forking pstoedit per se.
Now when EMF export works on Windows only, and some import features are, in opposite, UNIX-only, I wonder what the official POV is. Is it "we can't provide native import/export on all supported platforms now, so we do the best we can"? (I hope I'm not sounding too negative)
Alexandre
On Mon, 2007-01-08 at 07:09 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:
Now when EMF export works on Windows only, and some import features are, in opposite, UNIX-only, I wonder what the official POV is. Is it "we can't provide native import/export on all supported platforms now, so we do the best we can"? (I hope I'm not sounding too negative)
It's impossible for us to implement Postscript import without using Ghostscript -- even pstoedit is based on it. A Postscript interpreter is just too big an effort to do from scratch, and Ghostscript is the only usable open source one.
If we want Postscript import on Windows, maybe we should consider bundling Ghostscript as part of the Inkscape package.
-mental
On 2007-January-07 , at 16:35 , bulia byak wrote:
On 1/7/07, jiho <jo.irisson@...400...> wrote:
As a reminder for everyone the issue to sort out was to replace skconvert by pstoedit in input extensions in order to remove the (large) dependency on skencil. This depended on the availability of the plot-svg backend in pstoedit, which is provided by an additional package (plotutils).
Well, it's not exactly easy to figure that there's any connection at all between pstoedit and plotutils. The web site of plotutils never mentions pstoedit. The web site of stoedit mentions plotutils once but not in connection with SVG; for SVG, it offers its own crippled shareware SVG back-end.
I installed pstoedit 3.33 and plotutils 2.4.1 from source but I don't see any way to make them work together. "pstoedit -f plot-svg" says "Unsupported driver plot-svg". Ideas?
I have pstoedit 3.4 and plotutils 2.4.1 and they work together just fine. I haven't done anything special. the softwares were installed via a package management system and not from source but I doubt this makes a difference. did you install pstoedit before or after plotutils? what does $ pstoedit -f help lists? polt-svg isn't listed there? I have: plot-svg: .svg: svg via GNU libplot (/sw/ lib/pstoedit-3.40/libp2edrvlplot.0.0.0.so)
JiHO --- http://jo.irisson.free.fr/
On 1/7/07, jiho <jo.irisson@...400...> wrote:
I have pstoedit 3.4 and plotutils 2.4.1 and they work together just fine.
Can we package them into the Windows installer? If this is going to be a Linux-only feature it won't be as useful.
jiho wrote:
On 2007-January-07 , at 16:35 , bulia byak wrote:
On 1/7/07, jiho <jo.irisson@...400...> wrote:
As a reminder for everyone the issue to sort out was to replace skconvert by pstoedit in input extensions in order to remove the (large) dependency on skencil. This depended on the availability of the plot-svg backend in pstoedit, which is provided by an additional package (plotutils).
Well, it's not exactly easy to figure that there's any connection at all between pstoedit and plotutils. The web site of plotutils never mentions pstoedit. The web site of stoedit mentions plotutils once but not in connection with SVG; for SVG, it offers its own crippled shareware SVG back-end.
I installed pstoedit 3.33 and plotutils 2.4.1 from source but I don't see any way to make them work together. "pstoedit -f plot-svg" says "Unsupported driver plot-svg". Ideas?
I have pstoedit 3.4 and plotutils 2.4.1 and they work together just fine. I haven't done anything special. the softwares were installed via a package management system and not from source but I doubt this makes a difference. did you install pstoedit before or after plotutils? what does $ pstoedit -f help lists? polt-svg isn't listed there? I have: plot-svg: .svg: svg via GNU libplot (/sw/ lib/pstoedit-3.40/libp2edrvlplot.0.0.0.so)
pstoedit has to be specifically compiled with plotutils support in order to provide the plot-svg option, so it's going to vary from one distro to another. It's not a run-time dependency unfortunately. The dependency exist in Fedora, and I've been using a patch for a while to support ps input from pstoedit rather than skencil. No-one has complained on our side :-)
-denis
Hi Denis,
The most recent version of pstoedit in Fedora supports plot-svg output if the appropriate package is installed. (I forget which.)
Anyway, that's currently being used for the LaTeX Equation extension. The code for that extension has some (relatively) generic SVG import python code which could be used elsewhere.
Cheers, Marcus
Denis Leroy wrote:
Hi,
The current PostScript input extensions are dependent on the skconvert utility (it uses pstoedit -f sk to produce sketch format), itself part of Skencil, a "competing" (? :-) ) vector drawing project.
As the Fedora inkscape maintainer, this dependency is somewhat problematic. From a distribution/packaging perspective, it is difficult to justify a hard dependency between inkscape and skencil as skencil is itself another desktop application and also fairly large. It is also somewhat non-intuitive and confusing to the end-user (and as a side-note, skencil might be dropped eventually because it's still based on gtk1). Now, I would still like to have PostScript import work out of the box as that's a feature that was requested by several users.
So my questions: why the skconvert dependency ? Are there any alternatives ? pstoedit has many output formats (such as plot-svg using GNU libplot), is it possible to use a different one to achieve the same result ?
-denis
Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=D... _______________________________________________ Inkscape-devel mailing list Inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/inkscape-devel
participants (7)
-
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
Denis Leroy -
jiho -
Marcus Brubaker -
MenTaLguY