On Nov 15, 2006, at 8:56 AM, Alan Horkan wrote:

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.

The main problem there is with "sufficient" support.

Using GdkPixbuf would allow someone to get *something* out, but with a very low quality. Good conversion involves many other things including color reduction, dithering, quality settings, preview, etc.

With a bitmap editor like The GIMP you have most of that already in the program, and then extras can be added here and there (look at The GIMP's export for JPEG). If Inkscape wanted to support things enough on the bitmap front to not frustrate users, it would be a huge amount of work.

It's better to do one thing and do it well than to do a lot of things poorly.