Decided to look into the current state of vector graphics support
today. My original testcase was whether would be able to load a graphics into Inkscape then load then save and load the image into OpenOffice. As I tested I increased my target by doing various other tests testing interoperability. The origin for my testing was the hope that SVG support would be so commonplace and good now that we had achieved full interoperability beetween large parts of the desktop. Ended up testing a lot of random file formats and viewers.
I put together a page with my test results and the result was not exactly what I had hoped :)
Be aware that I don’t consider any of the results here as proof of anything except that as a normal user spending 2-3 hours on the problem this was as far as I got.
Make sure to make these results known to the implementors.
Not sure I remember correctly, but doesn’t the EPS-file contain an embedded bitmap for preview purposes? And isn’t it so that OpenOffice shows you just the preview? But you would get the proper PostScript if you printed it.
I dont think the Karbon developers are under any illusions and a dedicated developer could get a whole lot done. Not to put any pressure on you Christian but I’m sure they would welcome the help of anyone reading this. Specific bug reports would probably still be helpful if you can spare the time, or even send a message to the Koffice mailing list.
I’m concerned that Inkscape is a little overhyped at times (including in the release notes, and Bulia isn’t going to like me saying so) and while it is great having people say so many nice things about Inkscape it is a shame when people get the wrond idea. The use extensions wrapping other programs to indirectly get additional file format support is useful but people have wildly different expectations of what supported really means. The Adobe Illustrator (AI) support you tested in Inkscape is quite probably the AI support in Skencil/Sketch being used indirectly.
There is quite a lot of work going inot the Inkscape PDF export, and given that since Adobe Illustrator 10 the file format is a variation of PDF one would hope the Inkscape developers can kill two birds with one stone and have PDF/AI export as more or less the same thing.
Bryce Harrington did have some kind of large automated test suite organised that would test sample documents against many different applications, which might be of interest, might help you to automate these tests and rerun them later.
The relevant bug report for SVG support in OpenOffice:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2497
You might want to try the proof of concept libsvg based importer too.
Typo?
Learned a new word just now:
wether
n. castrated ram.
http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/difficultwords/data/d0013725.html
Hi Alan,
Yeah, I always tend to mispell whether :). Regarding the format support that wasn’t really ‘my point’ as far as I was trying to make one. My goal of the whole exercise was just to see if I could exchange images between Inkscape and OpenOffice. Then as I was testing that I decided to try out other apps to see if it was possible at all. I do ‘blame’ OpenOffice the most of the current state since they don’t support SVG properly, which is the major free format in the area (even if they would probably love for it to be .odg) and which everyone else supports.
I guess I hoped that by pointing out the current state of affairs I could maybe encourage someone to get involved with some of these projects to help move things forward.
> eah, I always tend to mispell whether
>> wrond idea
I never make spelling mistakes ;)
(I’m very glad livejournal has built in spellchecking and I sure wish Wikipedia did too.)
The external plugin for importing SVG in OpenOffice.org needs Sun Java 1.5 as a minimum. I guess this is why it failed on Feodra using gcj (but I am also on Fedora using gcj and never tested the plugin myself).