On Wed, 2006-11-15 at 16:56, Alan Horkan wrote:
On Wed, 15 Nov 2006, Andrew S. Townley wrote:
On Tue, 2006-11-14 at 18:42, Mike Causer wrote:
On Tue, 14 Nov 2006 10:38:00 +0000 "Andrew S. Townley" <atownley@...16...> wrote:
Are there any plans to support exporting to other image formats than PNG in the future?
As a vector graphics program raster graphics are not a high priority. Generally speaking file formats are not a high priority, SVG and PDF seem to be the two essential vector formats. PNG provides just enough that people can rasterize and finish off their work in other progams.
I'm still a little surprised Inkscape does not use GdkPixbuf and gain all the formats it supports. As a vector graphics program I would expect raster support to come largely from GdkPixbuf and other infrastructure Inkscape could use without significant additional maintaince costs (inkscape already hauls around most of the rest of GTK so using this feature shouldn't be a big deal). It makes most sense to implement these things once so many GTK applications can benefit. Since there is no GIF support in GdkPixbuf it seems extremely unlikely to be added to Inkscape but I do hope GdkPixbuf support will be added soon.
Oops I take that back "Gdk-pixbuf currently supports PNG, XPM, JPEG, TIFF, PNM, RAS, BMP, and even the patented GIF format" http://developer.gnome.org/doc/books/WGA/graphics-gdk-pixbuf.html
The most relevant request in the tracker is probably this one: [ 1516747 ] JPEG (.jpg) export support please https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1516747&gr...
Of course if developers really wanted to they could go in totally the other direction, put less emphasis on vectors and more on raster graphics. Developers could use Inkscape as the basis for an excellent raster graphics program, similar to how Macromedia built Fireworks or Microsoft built/bought Expression. However I do think that is unlikley to happen especially since it would involve reinventing so much of the GNU Image Manipulation Program.
Thanks for the explanation. I can see where you're coming from with it, but let me share a little bit of my main usage scenario so maybe you can see where I'm coming from.
My main purpose for using Inkscape is exactly so I can define vector versions of images and diagrams (including text) that I can then export for use in other programs. I used to do this sort of stuff in OO draw, but it isn't quite sophisticated enough in some cases. What I mostly create are either complete technical diagrams for use in documentation, presentations or on websites, so the majority of the clients of the images can't handle vector graphics.
What I like about using Inkscape is that it is pretty sophisticated (sometimes a little too much so for what I do), so when I need to do something crazy, I can do it more easily than I could in OOD. Most of the time, I can deal with PNG as the image format (Word and PowerPoint generally do the right thing with it), but it doesn't work for cross-browser support on the web very well (and won't for quite a while).
I realize that I'm not really your target audience because I only do creative digital design work occasionally, but providing built-in support for exporting to various image formats through GdkPixbuf would be a big benefit for me. I'm not a big fan of Visio, and I'd have to run it under cxoffice/wine anyway, so that isn't ideal. Unfortunately Word and PowerPoint are necessary evils because you can't guarantee how the conversion from OO will work when people open the files.
So, while I can understand that bitmap graphic export isn't a high priority for the project, it would certainly be something I'd like to see. I'm not asking for Inkscape to become a bitmap graphic editor. As you say, the GIMP is already quite capable in that respect.
Until SVG is more widely supported within other applications as a "native" image format, I see no other way to accomplish what I do and have scalable images and text than create them as SVG in Inkscape and export them to suitable bitmap formats (PNG, JPG and GIF) for the audiences I have.
Sorry if this got a bit long. Thanks for listening.
ast