Dear Inkscape developers,
I was wondering, if anyone know what's has happened to the merge of Xara Xtreme and Inkscape?
The Xara Xtreme website haven't been updated for over a year, but the GPL source is still available from their SVN.
Lots of love, Louise
On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 11:03:58PM +0100, Louise Hoffman wrote:
Dear Inkscape developers,
I was wondering, if anyone know what's has happened to the merge of Xara Xtreme and Inkscape?
This was speculated about early on, but never came about.
The Xara Xtreme website haven't been updated for over a year, but the GPL source is still available from their SVN.
The piece of most interest in sharing - the renderer - was never open sourced.
The opened portions are mainly the UI, which unfortunately was implemented using wxWindows rather than gtk, so is not directly transferrable.
That said, if anyone wished to do some mining in the source, perhaps there are useful ideas that could be borrowed?
Bryce
This was speculated about early on, but never came about.
What a shame. I remember their statement about how important it was for join forces to prevent Xara Xtreme from being killed by Illustrator.
The piece of most interest in sharing - the renderer - was never open sourced.
Reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara_Xtreme
I got the impression that it would have to replaced with Cairo no matter what, due to license issues and that Xara's render only compiled on i386?
Isn't Cairo superior?
The opened portions are mainly the UI, which unfortunately was implemented using wxWindows rather than gtk, so is not directly transferrable.
I see.
That said, if anyone wished to do some mining in the source, perhaps there are useful ideas that could be borrowed?
If you know of a manual for Xara Xtreme, I would love to read it, and make list of features that it have that Inkscape doesn't.
On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 11:30:59PM +0100, Louise Hoffman wrote:
This was speculated about early on, but never came about.
What a shame. I remember their statement about how important it was for join forces to prevent Xara Xtreme from being killed by Illustrator.
I never really got a clear sense of how such a merge would be carried out. Merging the codebases looked to be quite challenging technically, since despite the outward UI similarities, they were implemented considerably differently.
Merging the *projects* (the human element) looked even more challenging, and didn't really get much discussion.
Inkscape is a very community-driven, community-owned project, with decisions made bottom-up through merit and hard work; this sort of structure encourages and incentivizes volunteers. Xara is a more traditional corporate entity, with decisions and directions driven top-down by the management; this type of structure can be less appealing to volunteers (especially ones accustomed to the more free approaches of projects like Inkscape). Fitting those two organizational philosophies together without completely ruining the result would be a major, major achievement.
The piece of most interest in sharing - the renderer - was never open sourced.
Reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara_Xtreme
I got the impression that it would have to replaced with Cairo no matter what, due to license issues and that Xara's render only compiled on i386?
Yes, that was the approach they ended up taking. But I think the infeasibility of a merge had been pretty evident well before that was decided.
Isn't Cairo superior?
It is, although not for the reasons you might expect. With renderers, people often look at the performance and mathematical correctness as the primary measures. At the time Xara was looking at it, they claimed that their engine was much, much faster than Cairo; cworth was very interested in this, but could never get the benchmarks from them to verify their results. So we don't know if they were using a recent or old version of Cairo, what sorts of optimizations were done, etc. As well, cworth began a long program of focusing on performance starting about that point, and it's possible that today he's closed that gap. It's impossible to say, however, without rerunning the tests; it's conceivable Xara could still rank better on those benchmarks.
But the real reason why Cairo is superior is because it is a widely adopted renderer that's integrated into and supported by the Open Source community as a whole. Using Cairo means you benefit from improvements made in it, and means that you're more likely to remain compatible with other Open Source programs.
The opened portions are mainly the UI, which unfortunately was implemented using wxWindows rather than gtk, so is not directly transferrable.
I see.
That said, if anyone wished to do some mining in the source, perhaps there are useful ideas that could be borrowed?
If you know of a manual for Xara Xtreme, I would love to read it, and make list of features that it have that Inkscape doesn't.
I don't know of one, but would expect their website to carry it if it is available anywhere.
Thanks, Bryce
I never really got a clear sense of how such a merge would be carried out. Merging the codebases looked to be quite challenging technically, since despite the outward UI similarities, they were implemented considerably differently.
So perhaps it would be easier to use the Xara source as a spec. on how to make a certain functionality?
Merging the *projects* (the human element) looked even more challenging, and didn't really get much discussion.
Inkscape is a very community-driven, community-owned project, with decisions made bottom-up through merit and hard work; this sort of structure encourages and incentivizes volunteers. Xara is a more traditional corporate entity, with decisions and directions driven top-down by the management; this type of structure can be less appealing to volunteers (especially ones accustomed to the more free approaches of projects like Inkscape). Fitting those two organizational philosophies together without completely ruining the result would be a major, major achievement.
I got the understanding that Xara would not interfere with the Inkscape community or how Inkscape works (code wise). Xara would then implement the functionality that they felt were important in the case where the community prioritized feature X over feature Y.
Isn't Cairo superior?
It is, although not for the reasons you might expect. With renderers, people often look at the performance and mathematical correctness as the primary measures. At the time Xara was looking at it, they claimed that their engine was much, much faster than Cairo; cworth was very interested in this, but could never get the benchmarks from them to verify their results. So we don't know if they were using a recent or old version of Cairo, what sorts of optimizations were done, etc. As well, cworth began a long program of focusing on performance starting about that point, and it's possible that today he's closed that gap. It's impossible to say, however, without rerunning the tests; it's conceivable Xara could still rank better on those benchmarks.
Today I looked at the splash sceens for 0.46, and that was the first time ever I felt that Inkscape wasn't crisp in regards to speed on my 2GHz AMD64 and onboard nForce6 GPU.
But the real reason why Cairo is superior is because it is a widely adopted renderer that's integrated into and supported by the Open Source community as a whole. Using Cairo means you benefit from improvements made in it, and means that you're more likely to remain compatible with other Open Source programs.
Yes, it's beautiful that e.g. Mozilla choose Cairo for Firefox 3. I would assume that means they commit patches back to Cairo rather than doing workarounds in Firefox 3.
I don't know of one, but would expect their website to carry it if it is available anywhere.
I have started a thread at Talk Graphics Forum, so let's see what that brings. Otherwise that could be a Google SoC project to sort out the functions from Xara? =)
One thing I definitely would like to see is importing of Xara files.
What would it take to implement that? Copy/paste from Xara source, or write loader from scratch?
On Sat, Jan 19, 2008 at 03:24:09AM +0100, Louise Hoffman wrote:
I never really got a clear sense of how such a merge would be carried out. Merging the codebases looked to be quite challenging technically, since despite the outward UI similarities, they were implemented considerably differently.
So perhaps it would be easier to use the Xara source as a spec. on how to make a certain functionality?
Yes.
Merging the *projects* (the human element) looked even more challenging, and didn't really get much discussion.
Inkscape is a very community-driven, community-owned project, with decisions made bottom-up through merit and hard work; this sort of structure encourages and incentivizes volunteers. Xara is a more traditional corporate entity, with decisions and directions driven top-down by the management; this type of structure can be less appealing to volunteers (especially ones accustomed to the more free approaches of projects like Inkscape). Fitting those two organizational philosophies together without completely ruining the result would be a major, major achievement.
I got the understanding that Xara would not interfere with the Inkscape community or how Inkscape works (code wise). Xara would then implement the functionality that they felt were important in the case where the community prioritized feature X over feature Y.
I'm not sure it would have been that simple.
If it had been a case where Xara would "wrapper" Inkscape, dropping their own product in favor of our codebase, and layering their commercial goodness atop, it might have been feasible that way.
The alternative would be for the Inkscape community to discard Inkscape's code and en masse shift focus to learning and working on Xara's code. Perhaps there were some expectations on their end that this would happen, and I suppose if they had gone 100% open source, and had respectfully engaged our community the right way, there might have been a chance of that. But I think Inkscape contributors loved inkscape too much to discard it; furthermore, their code was open but encumbered by a non-open renderer. The "developer agreement" we were required to sign felt weird, and made the situation feel not quite as free as just working in Inkscape.
A third option would be some form of merging of the codebases. We did look into this, and as I mentioned before it just didn't look doable technically.
Isn't Cairo superior?
It is, although not for the reasons you might expect. With renderers, people often look at the performance and mathematical correctness as the primary measures. At the time Xara was looking at it, they claimed that their engine was much, much faster than Cairo; cworth was very interested in this, but could never get the benchmarks from them to verify their results. So we don't know if they were using a recent or old version of Cairo, what sorts of optimizations were done, etc. As well, cworth began a long program of focusing on performance starting about that point, and it's possible that today he's closed that gap. It's impossible to say, however, without rerunning the tests; it's conceivable Xara could still rank better on those benchmarks.
Today I looked at the splash sceens for 0.46, and that was the first time ever I felt that Inkscape wasn't crisp in regards to speed on my 2GHz AMD64 and onboard nForce6 GPU.
Please keep in mind that by definition, those screens use new features to Inkscape that are relatively new.
I don't know of one, but would expect their website to carry it if it is available anywhere.
I have started a thread at Talk Graphics Forum, so let's see what that brings. Otherwise that could be a Google SoC project to sort out the functions from Xara? =)
Might be a good idea. If you'd like to start crafting up some thoughts on that subject, feel free to start a Blueprint (http://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/), we could draw from when doing GSoC proposals if they choose to include Inkscape in their program again this summer.
One thing I definitely would like to see is importing of Xara files.
What would it take to implement that? Copy/paste from Xara source, or write loader from scratch?
There were a couple efforts on their end to implement this, although I don't know what status they're at so you'd want to research into it a bit to see whether it'd be worth building off of it vs starting a third effort. The file format also has public documentation, which would make creating a converter a hopefully straightforward task regardless. I imagine it'd require a good bit of testing to address all the various corner cases.
What I would do is create a standalone xar2svg program, maybe with options for whether to use Inkscape namespaced SVG or plain. I believe both the previous efforts were geared towards this approach.
Bryce
I'm not sure it would have been that simple.
If it had been a case where Xara would "wrapper" Inkscape, dropping their own product in favor of our codebase, and layering their commercial goodness atop, it might have been feasible that way.
The alternative would be for the Inkscape community to discard Inkscape's code and en masse shift focus to learning and working on Xara's code. Perhaps there were some expectations on their end that this would happen, and I suppose if they had gone 100% open source, and had respectfully engaged our community the right way, there might have been a chance of that. But I think Inkscape contributors loved inkscape too much to discard it; furthermore, their code was open but encumbered by a non-open renderer. The "developer agreement" we were required to sign felt weird, and made the situation feel not quite as free as just working in Inkscape.
A third option would be some form of merging of the codebases. We did look into this, and as I mentioned before it just didn't look doable technically.
It is very interesting to hear the communities side of the story. Xara made it sound to trivial in their FAQ.
Might be a good idea. If you'd like to start crafting up some thoughts on that subject, feel free to start a Blueprint (http://blueprints.launchpad.net/inkscape/), we could draw from when doing GSoC proposals if they choose to include Inkscape in their program again this summer.
Thanks. I have now added 2.
There were a couple efforts on their end to implement this, although I don't know what status they're at so you'd want to research into it a bit to see whether it'd be worth building off of it vs starting a third effort. The file format also has public documentation, which would make creating a converter a hopefully straightforward task regardless. I imagine it'd require a good bit of testing to address all the various corner cases.
What I would do is create a standalone xar2svg program, maybe with options for whether to use Inkscape namespaced SVG or plain. I believe both the previous efforts were geared towards this approach.
The second blueprint I added was for such a problem. I hope it will be picked up =)
On Jan 18, 2008 10:24 PM, Louise Hoffman <louise.hoffman@...400...> wrote:
One thing I definitely would like to see is importing of Xara files.
What would it take to implement that? Copy/paste from Xara source, or write loader from scratch?
That's relatively simple. In the Xara source, they have a separate utility for converting xar files to svg and back. So all is needed is to pull that utility from their source tree and make it compilable on its own. Then it can be included as an optional part into Inkscape's tree and install with Inkscape, and then it will be a matter of writing two simple scripts for importing/exporting xar files from within Inkscape.
What would it take to implement that? Copy/paste from Xara source, or write loader from scratch?
That's relatively simple. In the Xara source, they have a separate utility for converting xar files to svg and back. So all is needed is to pull that utility from their source tree and make it compilable on its own. Then it can be included as an optional part into Inkscape's tree and install with Inkscape, and then it will be a matter of writing two simple scripts for importing/exporting xar files from within Inkscape.
That sounds so cool! =)
On 18/01/2008, Louise Hoffman <louise.hoffman@...400...> wrote:
If you know of a manual for Xara Xtreme, I would love to read it, and make list of features that it have that Inkscape doesn't.
I have a Xtreme manual (given to me gratis by Xara at LGM1 in 2006) that I could post you; mail me off list with your address and I'll send it over :-)
On Jan 19, 2008 1:30 AM, Louise Hoffman wrote:
If you know of a manual for Xara Xtreme, I would love to read it, and make list of features that it have that Inkscape doesn't.
Yet another? :)
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Xara_X
Alexandre
participants (5)
-
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
Dave Crossland -
Louise Hoffman