With Myrk's nifty ribbon.svg submission and Simarilius' SVG Signs contribution this morning, we're now officially ready to receive SVG clipart collections for Inkscape.
Clipart is extremely important for users of vector art programs, because it can save a lot of time when making certain kinds of drawings, and to provide examples users can start with when making their own creations.
I think it'd be most effective (and fun) to leave this process fairly open ended and flexible, since that's how we like to do things in this project. What we plan to do is treat each clipart "collection" as it's own discrete package, that is welcome to set its own rules and conventions as its contributors see fit. We'll distribute a few with Inkscape itself, others can be provided as separate add-ins.
So, if you want you can establish your own collection of just your own work, or can collaborate with other users for a group effort. You can set up some organization and standards for quality control or to maintain a theme, or leave it freeform. Whatever works best for you.
Let's collect info and ideas about Clipart Collections on this wiki page, to document HOWTO's, ideas, questions, guidelines, etc.:
http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ClipartContribution
If you want to start working on a clipart collection, please feel free to add a link to the appropriate page(s) there.
Bryce
[not CC'ing the user list, this is a developer issue]
Feel free to change the subject lines in your replies as I have gotten a bit carried away and addressed more than a few topics.
On Sat, 14 Feb 2004, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2004 13:58:33 -0800 (PST) From: Bryce Harrington <bryce@...1...> To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: [Inkscape-user] Call For Clipartists
With Myrk's nifty ribbon.svg submission and Simarilius' SVG Signs contribution this morning, we're now officially ready to receive SVG clipart collections for Inkscape.
I expect many of you have already considered this but there are plenty of existing pieces of SVG (or almost SVG*) clipart available out there, even in existing linux distributions.
Organsing the clipart will definately get very complicated very quickly, even with something like the Sodipodi Flags clipart collection it would be useful to be able to quickly browse and search the collection or look at subcategories. Ideally rich metadata would be added using something like Dublin Core specification and generic applications like Nautilus would make it easy to search.
I've been meaning to use Jimmacs clipart and icons for a while, hopefully next time I have to draw a network Diagram or suchlike I'll fire up Inkscape and give it a go. http://jimmac.musichall.cz/i.php3?ikony=80
The reason I mention this is because most of the shapes in Dia http://www.lysator.liu.se/~alla/dia/ are SVG based wrapped in a certain amount of its own custom markup (* almost SVG). Dia has a reasonably good collection of its own shapes, and Dia can use Xfig shapes too which means even more clipart and it is already difficult to manage that many.
While I would like to be able to use the shape sets I have created for Dia it would require reformatting them as SVG or for Inkscape to be able to extract the SVG from abitrary XML which I have filed a request for. http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=847365&grou... (would be useful too for extracting the subset of SVG used by OpenOffice directly from their documents). I'll definately be adding the creative commons licensing to my next shapeset submission to Dia (some isometric road shapes modelled on a Visio shape set. it include a car that took ages to draw using the tools in Dia but I'm still very proud of it
Ideally Dia would have better SVG support but the reality is that it doesnt yet (even though it has some support through both a built-in and XSLT based solutions).
It would be extremely helpful for applications like Dia but not just Dia (the KDE SVG applicatoins, applicatoins like librsvg and more) if something could be done to homogenize and simplify the SVG/XML used in any of these clipart collections rather than allowing all kinds of SVG and (ab)using it as a test suite. [This being by far the most important point I have to make in this entire mail]
I would assume that you the developers as well as makers of Linux distributions would already want to avoid any Sodipodi or Inkscape specific markup. Dia for example is not yet aware of colours being specified as RGB (0,0,0) rather Hexidecimal #000000, and I am sure there are plenty of other simple things. (I haven't checked recently but if I recally correct the SVG importer in Dia cannot do namespaces, so that is only <svg> but not even svg:svg, so) I would understand if you were unwilling to go to huge efforts to accomodate other software but I would hope that you would try to keep things as consistant as possible.
I would imagine that a commandline batch export mode from Inkscape would be the best way to try and homogenize such a collection.
Clipart is extremely important for users of vector art programs, because it can save a lot of time when making certain kinds of drawings, and to provide examples users can start with when making their own creations.
I should also point to the huge collections of Clipart for legacy ;) systems usually in Microsoft Windows Meta Files (.wmf) or enhanced metafile (.emf). I'll try and file a report this afternoon requesting WMF support. I dont know how difficult it woudl be but there is already a library called libwmf that was part of the WvWare project. http://www.csn.ul.ie/~caolan/docs/libwmf.html
I think it'd be most effective (and fun) to leave this process fairly open ended and flexible, since that's how we like to do things in this project. What we plan to do is treat each clipart "collection" as it's own discrete package, that is welcome to set its own rules and conventions as its contributors see fit. We'll distribute a few with Inkscape itself, others can be provided as separate add-ins.
Does inkscape already have the functionality required so that multiple instances of clipart wont give massive files? (the <defs> tags in SVG is part of this isn't it?) If not is it high on any of the developers list of things to do, if the mention of a spraycan or hose tool that i vaguely recall is true then this would seem essential.
Let's collect info and ideas about Clipart Collections on this wiki page, to document HOWTO's, ideas, questions, guidelines, etc.:
http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?ClipartContribution
Sorry for being so verbose. Hopefully after a little discussion I'll be able to add some of the things we agree on to the Wiki.
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
participants (2)
-
Alan Horkan -
Bryce Harrington