On Sun, Mar 05, 2006 at 10:02:41PM +0100, Aaron Digulla wrote:

Bryce Harrington wrote:

...

We've received a surprising number of donations lately - surprising in the sense that we don't really solicit donations. I guess people just love Inkscape *that much*. :-)

Congrats :-) That means you can employ a developer for a month, now, to get something important fixed!

Like PS/EPS/AI import?

It seems that the latest version of pstoedit can now convert to SVG but that can probably be improved.

Yes, that's one of the highest priority things on the todo list. I don't think we have quite enough to do this yet; I estimated we'd need about twice what we currently have. Also I think we need more specific directions of what needs to be worked on.

What we really need are people's opinions on what the plan should be to do this work. There is a page here where you can add your thoughts:

http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/PrintingConsensusPoll

Bryce

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 05:31:32PM +0100, Aaron Digulla wrote:

Bryce Harrington wrote:

...

What we really need are people's opinions on what the plan should be to do this work. There is a page here where you can add your thoughts: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/PrintingConsensusPoll

I think what we need is someone to do it :-) The link shows that there is interest but no real direction.

Why do we need to define what PDF should be able to do? Why not start with a simple line-drawing (no fills) and then extend from that?

Well, basically as I see it we have (at least) two different ways to tackle this.

One approach would be, yeah, start with something simple and extend it; this is how a lot of useful work has been done in inkscape - someone with an interest just gets into it and starts doing it. They are motivated by something better than just money, and as we've seen, this works very well.

However, we've not been able to find a coder with this inner motivation to work on the PDF issues. Maybe it's too hard or too complex? Or maybe people who can code have other ways to solve their needs?

So, the second approach is the traditional "sponser someone to do the work". However, this approach requires a bit more care. We need to be specific about the requirements and expectations. This means we need to understand exactly what can't be done right now, and what users would expect from this effort. Of course, we also have to find someone with the skill and interest to do this work...

Indeed, I've heard conflicting statements; some say PDF export is impossible, others claim they've been doing it for a long time. So is it that PDF export works but is incomplete, or does it work only for certain configurations? Maybe it works for Linux but not OSX? Unfortunately, this is not a feature I personally need so I don't really have a good understanding of what the problems are, so while I'm interested in helping us find a direction to getting it solved, it's really going to depend on others to get involved by contributing ideas and helping us get organized.

So, what we really need is for a couple people who are REALLY BUGGED about this lacking feature to dedicate themselves towards helping us understand it, and help us organize the various ideas that have come up into a plan for fixing it.

Bryce

Joshua A. Andler wrote:

Just curious, how good is Cairo's PDF backend?

I made one PDF with Cairo via rsvg-convert a week or two ago. It seems to rasterize the output by default. When I dig around in the Cairo PDF code I can see that it has some routines for writing "real" PDF data. Through the grapevine I heard (and may be totally wrong) that they just haven't gotten around to coding the compromise between what people want and what PDF will do, ie rasterize only when needed.

From my (uneducated) vantage point Cairo PDF and uberconvertor PDF offer the best range of possibility. Both are important and need to be pursued for the SVG to PDF landscape to be useful to the greatest range of people. Cairo will be a WYSIWYG printing option; Uberconvertor will preserve the structure and meaning.

I don't personally need PDF output very badly, but I'm almost sick enough of hearing about the problem to start working on a fix. :-) We do desperately need people to organize and decompose the task so that a stream of people would be able to put a bit of work toward the goal as the spirit moves them. At this time the task isn't really approachable because no one knows where we stand or what to do next.

Aaron Spike

First, let me say that I use inkscape for at least two hours every day. Often more. I just finished my first hour-long presentation using slides made in Inkscape. I think inkscape is, beyond the linux kernel and python, the most awesome free software project I've ever had the pleasure of using.

But every time I try and get into the codebase, I'm always put off by a few things:

1. is it a C++ app or a C app? Is seems like the gtkmmification is always what people "should be" working on, but it never really moves forward. I try and understand the code, and there are function pointers and all sorts of other stuff hidden under there. Lots of the codebase still has functions with names left over from the SP fork.

So every time I'm like "I think I'll try fixing blah" I get frustrated because 1. I can't understand the code base 2. I worry that it'll all be for nothing, because once we switch to gtkmm/cairo/tiny-robot-api it'll all be undone.

2. I want to make the same claim for the "are we going to switch to cairo or not" discussion that seems to come up all the time. I've been told that numerous scaling bugs, zooming bugs, transformation problems, etc. are the result of the current backend, and that at some point a switch to cairo will make this all better. But then it feels like "why should I bother submitting a patch now?"

Inkscape has had numerous (wonderful) feature additions over the past year or so, and lots of UI fix-ups and whatnot. But I'd recommend just finding some way to maybe use the money in the kitty to get the core developers face-to-face, and commit to making the relevant architectural changes once and for all. These broad-sweeping changes are tough for people who are new to the codebase, who don't want to step on others toes, etc.

I'd volunteer to help but I'm trying to finish a thesis project, so I'd like to put my money where my mouth is and pledge $300 (about what I'd pay for Adobe Illustrator) to finish one of these major refactorings. I know we don't currently have a bounty system, etc. but if we did, or if one of the primary developers would just say "for our next release, we're going to do $foo" I'd send in my check. I know it's not much, but perhaps if enough people feel the same way we can pay for one of our beloved core developers to take a week or two off of their day jobs or something like that.

Inkscape is so wonderful. I think something like a decent PDF export would be much more likely to appear if the above code barriers to entry were eliminated.

Now, I'll shut up and put on my flame-proof suit :) ...Eric

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 01:46:19PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 05:31:32PM +0100, Aaron Digulla wrote:

...

Bryce Harrington wrote:

...

What we really need are people's opinions on what the plan should be to do this work. There is a page here where you can add your thoughts: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/PrintingConsensusPoll

I think what we need is someone to do it :-) The link shows that there is interest but no real direction.

Why do we need to define what PDF should be able to do? Why not start with a simple line-drawing (no fills) and then extend from that?

Well, basically as I see it we have (at least) two different ways to tackle this.

One approach would be, yeah, start with something simple and extend it; this is how a lot of useful work has been done in inkscape - someone with an interest just gets into it and starts doing it. They are motivated by something better than just money, and as we've seen, this works very well.

However, we've not been able to find a coder with this inner motivation to work on the PDF issues. Maybe it's too hard or too complex? Or maybe people who can code have other ways to solve their needs?

So, the second approach is the traditional "sponser someone to do the work". However, this approach requires a bit more care. We need to be specific about the requirements and expectations. This means we need to understand exactly what can't be done right now, and what users would expect from this effort. Of course, we also have to find someone with the skill and interest to do this work...

Indeed, I've heard conflicting statements; some say PDF export is impossible, others claim they've been doing it for a long time. So is it that PDF export works but is incomplete, or does it work only for certain configurations? Maybe it works for Linux but not OSX? Unfortunately, this is not a feature I personally need so I don't really have a good understanding of what the problems are, so while I'm interested in helping us find a direction to getting it solved, it's really going to depend on others to get involved by contributing ideas and helping us get organized.

So, what we really need is for a couple people who are REALLY BUGGED about this lacking feature to dedicate themselves towards helping us understand it, and help us organize the various ideas that have come up into a plan for fixing it.

Bryce

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Printed a diagram on the weekend, it was mainly coloured text with a single bitmap. The bitmap was a transparent-background PNG of the earth, so basically looked like a planetoid circle. The text around was in a big font, kind of a poster thing, with some smaller text paragraphs here & there.

When I printed it, all i got was a solid black circle on the page, no text printed at all.

I exported to PDF, apart from some clipping it seemed to export mostly ok (lost aboout 0.5cm from one end). This printed ok.

Any ideas?

thanks, -kt

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