a few comments see below:

Jon Phillips wrote:

On Fri, 2006-08-04 at 20:20 +0400, Alexandre Prokoudine wrote:

...

Hi,

FYI, there are LGPL tools to convert ArcView Shapefiles, used as common GIS exchange file format, to SVG: http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/utils/shp2svg/

The carto.net shapefile -> svg solution is really a 2 step perl script process - first converting to a postgis enabled postgres database file then to the svg file. Kind of cumbersome. This is because a "shp shapefile" is really 3 files: a geographical info file, an attribute dbf file and an index file. It's also only 2-D. A straight geo info to svg wouldn't be too hard (I already have a shp->java2d one) and the conversion to svg is on my forever asap list - I will post stuff here when I start working on it unless one of the better programmers beats me to it :)

...

And, btw, do we really want to forget cdr2svg.py script by Richard Hughes from September 2005?

Alexandre

Heya, at siggraph, I have many conversations with people about different file format converters: Google Earth people were interested, some cartography people were interested, and others. Basically, > 3 people from big companies were interested in GIS data in Inkscape, even if they have to chuck the altitude (the 3rd-D).

A svg connection with Google Earth would be very cool. re 3-D, it's a shame to chuck it - there wasn't too much interest in Inkscape 3-D as a SOC project this year but maybe next year! Remember Katrina was an elevation problem.

I will take first stroke at seeing if this converter works with Inkscape, as I messed around with this with another developer at siggraph...

Another opensource GIS program and format is "GRASS". But I'm not sure what their file format is like but would be a great format to have a conversion for and a good group to have a connection with.