I have a question for Inkscape users coming from Adobe Illustrator. How have you rebuilt your "Save For Web" workflow in Inkscape? Reading through the mailing lists I've come up with my own (incomplete) solution, and I'd like to see how I can improve it.
I've only recently - since the 0.44 release - started using Inkscape (I was waiting for the layers pallet.) Once I got the hang of the export bitmap dialog box, I was pretty happy. Currently I have a layer on top of my full page mockup called "export" (which could just as easily be called "slices"). On that layer I have a set of unfilled, unstroked rectangles. Each rectangle has the id set to a unique name (header_bg, button_bg, etc.) and when I need to export a .png to be referenced by my .css file, I select the rectangle choose File->Export Bitmap, click the Selection tab, and export the selection out at 90 dpi. All is well.
But sometimes - typically after I've had sign-off on a full page illustration, but before I've started my HTML mockup - I need to export all the selection rectangles at once, and I haven't really found a way in Inkscape to do this. From the mailing lists I know that there was an extension (SVGslice) that exported slices and html, but I'm having trouble running it on XP, and don't really need the .html anyway.
In the future, as browser support improves, I'd also like to be able to export individual .svg objects that would be referenced by the .css or .html files. Again, the mailing lists have been helpful with suggestions on how to keep libraries of individual .svg resources and import them into one file (e.g. import character illustrations into a comic strip), but our workflow goes the other way.
In our department we use AI, and now Inkscape, to design web application UI/UE. First we create a series of sketches, developing the UI elements in the context of the full page to the point where we have a tight, accurate illustration that gets final approval. Then we create a mockup with .html, .css and .png files that is developed into a series of prototypes until the final template files are delivered to the software engineers.
Our sketches-illustrations-mockups-prototypes-templates thing works pretty well, but I feel like I'm pushing it when I try bring Inkscape into the workflow. Inkscape is great with a create-one-from-one workflow, but mine is really a create-many-from-one workflow. So I'm not sure if I'm asking the tool to do something (save multiple selections as bitmaps to a directory of my choosing, and warn me if I'm overwriting an existing file) that it was never intended to do.
Just to cover my bases, I know that I could export out a bitmap of the full page illustration and then cut it up in The Gimp, or use ImageMagik, but that's one of the (many, many) reasons why I've soured on Adobe's tools in the first place. Having to launch big apps to do simple (To me, anyway. I'll understand if what I've described above is actually complicated to code.) tasks.
So, thanks for reading this far. I'm just one data point, but I'll bet there are other disgruntled AI users who are looking at Inkscape that realizing, "Hey, I *can* use this in production!" Especially those of us who are really focused on eventually delivering .svg assets.
So to those AI users: How have you rebuilt your "Save For Web" workflow in Inkscape?