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.