On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 10:32:15AM -0400, Tony Wieczorek via RT wrote:

Hu Bryce. First, let me say that I love Inkscape! One of the sysadmins in our office was blown back by all the funtionality it has. I use it quite often these days, to design stickers and posters.

Cool. :-)

My frustrations were with exporting the sign in a format that Kinkos would understand. Perhaps I should have made it clearer that my frustrations weren't with using Inkscape so much as they were with dealing with all the various file formats. The format choices were confusing - especially since I didn't know that Kinkos couldn't open the Inkscape SVG, but seemed to be able to open the regular SVG format. It might have been helpful to get a rough estimate of how large the files would be once I saved them - certain

Aha, yes this was my guess. The file format frustrations are very, very common. These are tough to solve because as you can imagine they're a tad outside our core scope, but you'll be happy to hear we've been speaking with others in the free software community (especially Cairo and Scribus) with more experience than us, and hope to have PDF and EPS working much more solidly in the future.

Meantime, it's actually quite exciting to hear that Kinko's supports any variant of SVG at all - I would have guessed SVG to be too "niche" still for them.

Note that the "plain SVG" format is stripped down form of SVG; Inkscape's SVG adheres 100% to the SVG standard. The "plain SVG" option avoids using otherwise valid SVG syntax that we have found that other programs have trouble with. Thus, it's there for exactly the situation you were in, and it's good to hear that it worked!

I appreciate you taking the time to write in and see if you've addressed the problems I had. I certainly love the work you all do and the progress you are making on an excellent project. Thanks so much.

Sure thing, hope you don't mind if I cc the team. And thank you from us for all the important work the FSF does, to help ensure the rest of us can keep doing what we're doing.

Bryce

...

Someone pointed me at your 4/26 article, which mentioned some frustrations using Inkscape to create a sign. Would you mind elaborating on what those issues were? I'm one of the Inkscape developers, and since we're preparing a new release soon, would like a chance to see if we've addressed those problems.

Thanks, Bryce

-- Tony Wieczorek Program Assistant (617) 542-5942

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