Jon A. Cruz wrote:
On Apr 11, 2007, at 11:46 PM, Bill Baxter wrote:
I'm curious about this one because the writeup basically says this
will create things that aren't SVG.� Is there a plan to make a new
file extension at some point?� It would still be mostly SVG, just
augmented with extra stuff.� The Inkscape-specific extension would be
like a warning -- "This is not plain vanilla svg and may not render
correctly as such".� Kinda like how .ai files are mostly just regular
.ps files, but if it doesn't look right in your .ps viewer, you know
you should try it in Illustrator.
I believe this one is more along the lines of allowing one to do basic manipulation of bitmaps (probably embedded or linked) without requiring switching to a different app. So if your SVG linked in a few bitmap files, you could adjust them in place.
There is definitely room for a program that can do both bitmap and vector graphics. For years, I have been using Paint Shop Pro, which in earlier versions had superb bit-map capabilities and quite respectable vector capabilities, and both were improving at such a rate that it would soon be strong (and much cheaper) competition to Corel Draw. A Paint Shop Pro graphic image can have multiple layers, which can be all bit-map layers, all vector layers, or a combination of both.
Unfortunately, Corel decided to deal with the competition situation by buying out JASC, the original producer of Paint Shop Pro. Corel has dropped development of the vector capabilities, and has positioned Paint Shop Pro as a simple low-end photo editor, and has removed some of the more advanced bit-map editing features, and has replaced the built-in thumbnailer with a much inferior one. The latest Corel version is also positively crawling with bugs. The original user base is much annoyed.
The Inkscape developers would do well to clone the Paint Shop Pro bit-map editing user interface and the original thumbnailer. It is a better user interface than what Photoshop has. An Inkscape like this would produce a mass defection of the Paint Shop Pro original user base to Inkscape. An Inkscape has the definite advantage in that being free/open-source software, it is immune to the kind of hatchet job that Corel did to Paint Shop Pro.