-----Original Message----- From: Shawn H Corey [mailto:shawnhcorey@...155...] Sent: maandag 10 januari 2011 1:15 To: inkscape-user@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-user] Inkscape Accurancy
On 11-01-09 06:51 PM, J.B.C.Engelen@...2072... wrote:
Not so. If I make a drawing of a square of 1x1 cm, I want the SVG document to say it is 1x1 cm. Doesn't matter how it is displayed on screen. Then I can mail the document to someone else, he
opens it, and
sees: ah, the square is 1x1 cm.
No so. Like you, he would only see what his monitor displays. But when he prints it or sends it to an automated tool, it comes out 1x1 cm.
(Sorry, I am getting angry. It would help if people would try to understand what we are saying, instead of repeating their earlier statements)
When he sends it to an automated tool, the tool software says: "hey this is SVG. And SVG does not specify what 1 px length is. So how large should this thing be?"
Apparently, I have still not explained our worries well enough. What we want is a document that specifies a line to have a certain length. The document should say: Line = 2 inch. This information is *not* to be used by the display system, or whatever output system *unless* it is desired to do so by the user. It seems that paths can only be specified in units of "px", which means we have to exactly relate the "px" unit to an absolute unit like inches.
Again, our concerns have nothing, whatsoever, to do with how the line is displayed. It has to do with how the dimensions are saved to SVG, and whether those dimensions is precisely defined or not.
If I draw a line of "2 inch" in Inkscape, save the SVG, and then open the SVG in another program. That program should also say that the line is 2 inch long. *Independent* of the DPI choice that program makes, or whatever.
The use case scenario is for a technical drawing, say a printed circuit board layout. It is not possible to specify the line to be 2 inch long in Inkscape, it is converted to "px" instead. So, because of the 90dpi choice of Inkscape, the line is 180px long in the SVG document. But the document should then specify 1 inch = 90 px, perhaps only in an Inkscape namespaced parameter if still nobody understands this important issue.
Yes, one solution is to always draw a scale bar on the drawing. Such that you can rescale the image accordingly when opening it in a different program. But this is ofcourse quite cumbersome.
-Johan