On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, Eric Jonas wrote:
Hello! Inkscape is really spectacular, and may once and for all rid me of my chronic dependence on Illustrator. The 0.39 sources compiled on my debian box with minimal hassle, and I'm quite happily using clones right now.
Good to hear; note that the 0.39 sources are actually a pre-0.39 development copy, so keep your eyes out for bugs and report.
But what I'd really like : ) would be some way of storing the original source for a clone in a file. I use Illustrator / will use inkscrape almost exclusively to diagram the internal guts of digital systems, with lots of symbols for flip-flops and the like. Thus it would be great to have a system-wide "register.svg" file that I could use as a base for the clone objects. I'm somewhat familiar with SVG and XML, and realize that this might not be possible.
It definitely is feasible. For example, all of the stroke markers (aka arrowheads) are defined in /usr/local/share/inkscape/markers/markers.svg, and are 'use'd into the document.
The question is whether Inkscape currently supports use-between-documents, in a fashion that would allow linking to your digital_symbols.svg. If not, you could probably look at how the markers.svg is hooked in, and come up with a general purpose mechanism for symbols.
Has anyone else wanted this sort of feature, and if so, has there been any thought as to how to implement it? I'd be willing to try and hack on it (I've got some gtkmm background) if I wouldn't be stepping on anyones' toes ,and someone could point me in the right direction.
Yep, this is definitely a direction we've been aiming for. Nobody is working on this feature specifically, but there is some efforts in this general area (markers, gradients, patterns, etc.) So you will want to coordinate with folks on general approach, but you can also get some direction from those efforts.
Also, along these lines but from an orthogonal direction, we've got an open clipart project collecting this sort of content, that we package and deliver for use with Inkscape and other SVG-enabled tools. This is at http://openclipart.org/. Eventually, I'm hoping that Inkscape will be able to seamlessly load up things like symbol libraries, etc. from these packages.
Bryce