There is also plenty to fix before things like wishlist items get attention. The text handling system and gradient banding issues, etc.
All new features should probably take a backseat while what is already there is fixed.
-C
On 21 Apr 2017 4:41 p.m., "Martin Owens" <doctormo@...155...> wrote:
This is more of an inkscape-devel discussion. But I'll add some thoughts here.
When SVG 1.1 was years and years old and no one except maybe Opera was doing anything with it at all, the Inkscape project added features, some from SVG 1.2 (flowing text etc), some from hacks (like the gradient stops) and some we just made whole cloth from our own xml namespace.
The problem comes when the SVG 2.0 specification really got going. We were left holding features which we'd probably have to keep being able to open, but other browsers and editors wouldn't ever be able to.
That's the core of the problem with doing things yourself.
What we lack here is a huge amount of developer time. We could do with having a whole brigade of selfless expert developers who follow instructions and produce amazing work. We'd also like it for free. This really is not realistic. We have instead is a small but amazing team of fairly even handed developers who follow their own passion projects and do it for sometimes free and sometimes outside contracts in a complex real world sort of way.
Making the call to add a feature is actually the fairly easy part. I have a plan for multi-page support using groups and a couple of inkscape attributes, but I don't have the developers to put it together. It's the kind of thing where a whip round in a hat would bring in a pile of gold enough to hire someone to do the work, but even doing the collection is work and that's a catch-22.
What we need is more inkscape-users who can really get involved in the project. Not development tasks (unless you want to ;-)) but some of these other tasks. Community projects that involve communication, news, asking for money, doing bug management. There's a lot out there, but a small chunk each and we'd have a more robust structure to build the next inkscape from.
So come join inkscape, your svg editor needs you.
Best Regards, Martin Owens
P.S. For animation, everyone should be paying attention to AniGen.org that's a single developer doing a strong job of putting an animation editor together.
On Fri, 2017-04-21 at 16:06 +0200, Donn Ingle wrote:
Seems SVG is more and more invisible to the big companies. Here's sad tale of Amelia Bellamy-Royds's experiences with SVG and its seeming demise. (http://codepen.io/AmeliaBR/post/me-and-svg)
I wonder how the Inkscape devs (et al.) feel about this. Could Inkscape not take a new route, perhaps bake-in some new features*, now that the SVG standards seem to be moot?
Multiple pages in one file — and export to multi-page PDFs. A real symbol system — within and between documents. Custom colours that don't rely on that fake gradient trick (And make them work between documents too!) Animation time lines. Output to gif, video and so forth. Perhaps to HTML5 Canvas with some js framework too. Scripting, Blender-style, right there in the app. In Python and JS perhaps. Opening of Gimp native files (xcf) into layers, perhaps. Use of 3D objects and materials, from Blender (say) directly in the canvas — some kind of OLE layer thing.
I am sure there are many more.
I think Inkscape could have, by now, matched what Flash, Freehand and Corel et al. had 20 years ago! It did not go there because it, honourably, stuck to the SVG standards.
Inkscape is the best thing we have for graphic design on Linux (at least), but it's still way too primitive. Could we dare to think bigger? Start our own standard?
Just wondering. Is this a disaster or an opportunity?
/d
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