The subject "Replacing ClarisWorks-vectorial with Inkscape" is best suited, hence I update the subject line. It is however limited to the graphics (vectorial) part of ClarisWorks or earlier ClarisDraw (both dead without valid successors).
Aaron Spike wrote:
Daniel's attachement reads:
Thank you.
A friend and me have developed a genealogy program to handle relationships between members of a family. It has a component to provide a graphical representation. The corresponding drawings file is input to a separate program which allows to adjust them in various ways and a subsequent output file may be read by the genealogy program. We are particle physicists, with a very long experience in the FORTRAN language which allows us to program whatever we need in terms of calculations and logical relations. We consider essentially Macintosh. We used pre-OSX systems but now convert to a more widely accessible environment (such as RealBasic). The genealogy program is under our responsibility but for the separate program handling drawings we relied on ClarisWorks. This program fulfilled totally our needs but did not survive. The last usable version is ClarisWorks-4 (and its transposition ClarisWorks-4 on Windows), all other later versions are useless for our needs. The underlying format is PICT (from QuickDraw).
Thus we need a program to replace ClarisWorks, for its vectorial functionalities. Hence we question if InkScape can fit our needs : 1-ability to read/write in a format that may be easily used -the PICT format from the old QuickDraw IS easy and well documented unfortunately it is virtually abandonned (to our knowledge) -the PDF format IS NOT easy, multiple versions exist which fool the various interpreters. There exists a fairly large book dated 2000 which is probabably now fairly useless (outdated) -the SVG format is used by InkScape does it need a navigator ? if so, which protection exists against frequent modifications of the navigators and the underlying format (s). It is most annoying that navigators are incompatible with each other and with the version they used yesterday ! 2-ability to modify graphical objects -add/suppress/change simple objects -text, lines, rectangles, circles (ellipses or any ovals) -copy/paste pictures from a Resource file (or another medium)
SVG is a standard created and maintained by the World-Wide Web Consortium or W3C, http://www.w3.org/ It is an XML-based standard and is modifiable by any XML editor or text editor (if you know how to write raw XML files, that is).
What you haven't made clear is whether your process is mostly manual or automatic. Inkscape is a drawing application. It allows people to easily create and modify SVG drawings. It has limited ability for automatic function via the command line.
Our processing is: -partly automatic, in the sense that we generated a drawing as a .pict file (using QuickDraw in pre-OSX era) using data collected by our program -partly manual, in the sense that we modify the above drawing adding graphical elements directly "hand-generated" or by means of copy paste from other drawings or pictures. We do not use command lines. It is already pretty difficult to get people approaching a computer mouse ... the keyboard is even more difficult! More seriously, we do not aim at people familiar with UNIX.
To be clearer, if needed, the subject as it is mentioned at the beginning is perfectly adequate. If I had the time for it and if I were competent enough to handle the present Apple tools (I'm getting too old to update myself) I would create such an application and ,I suspect, I would find clients for it as I see many customers asking for AppleWorks ... which was not able to replace ClarisWoirks properly.
Cordially Daniel
Without further clarification, I think I can give a definite answer of maybe to your questions.
-- Just my 0.00000002 million dollars worth, Shawn
Programming is as much about organization and communication as it is about coding.
Regardless of how small the crowd is, there is always one in it who has to find out the hard way that the laws of physics applies to them too.
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