Hi all,

About a year ago, I posted regarding a Python graphical scripting tool I was working on. I got sort of hung in the middle, because I started with Skencil, then started looking at Inkscape.

Inkscape was simpler in one respect because the SVG representation is easier to manipulate, but it's harder to integrate the plugin because I couldn't (easily) *use* Inkscape from the script.

For example, it would be nice to be able to select and skew an object using Inkscape's selection and transformation tool rather than having to compute and apply the transformation at the point level within my program, but that would require a way to call that tool from the Python script.

In Skencil, by contrast, this is relatively simple to do, because the Skencil API is completely accessible to scripts and plugins.

The downside is that Skencil uses an internal Python object model for the drawing which is not easily serializable. Thus, for example, it is very awkward to keep a library of drawing components available for my program to manipulate.

When I brought this up on inkscape-user, I was told that a DOM API would (at sometime) be made available which would solve this problem (although now that I think about it, "document" doesn't really fit, though "object model" does -- this may've been a miscommunication?)

I have recently seen "DOM" mentioned in the inkscape-devel archives, but that seems to be a different concept -- the idea of a DOM to describe the SVG file being manipulated, not the Inkscape application doing the manipulation.

I didn't have a pressing enough need for the tool I was writing to plow through this obstacle, so I wound up setting it aside, thinking that it might prove easier later anyway.

So I'd just like to ask if functionality like this already exists in Inkscape, is on an existing roadmap, or if this is something I ought to place as a feature request?

Cheers, Terry