Some time ago I put up a page detailing my pains in getting an image from Inkscape to OpenOffice. Well due to once again having an SVG I needed to import into Openoffice I decided to try again. And this time the SVG import filter from Bernhard Haumacher worked for me. Still some irritation behavioral issues in OpenOffice as I outline in the update on the page, but the import did work.

Hopefully with the relicensing effort of the Sun JDK this import filter will get bundled by the linux distros in the future in order to improve open source interoperability.

Discovered Synfig today which is a vector graphics animation package using gtkmm for its GUI. (Source code here). It looks very promising and hopefully they will be able to cooperate with Inkscape going forward as I assume they have some overlap. The similarities in library use should also be a plus in that regard. Would be great if Synfig got support for animated SVG files so it could be used for interchange of files between Synfig and the rest of the world, including GNOME and Inkscape.

As pointed out in Dom’s blog things are moving fast forward with librsvg these days, mostly thanks to Caleb. But both Dom and Carl Worth have been helping out as well. I have been updating the test tables almost daily recently as testcases have been fixed or improved. A recet fix by Caleb which I love is improved handling of percentage sized images, you can easily identify them in the table as both Batik and Inkscape tend to render them at the wrong size.

Tried taking a image comparison script by Bryce based on the Motiontrack package and use it to create additional stats for the SVG comparison chart, but I gave up after I couldn’t get it to give me a result I felt actually was informative. Font differences between the w3c reference images and my linux system didn’t make the commparison more trustworthy either.

Caleb is planing on working on some of the structural stuff needed for ICC support so that we can get that going next with Ross’s help.

After SVG Open got a lot of attention I got motivated to do something with SVG this weekend. So I created a bunch of scripts to generate png files from various svg rendering systems and a webpage displaying these png files side by side.

The results can be seen here on my SVG test page. As you can see librsvg is compares pretty well to the competition, although it seems our recent changes to add Cairo support have lead to quite a few regressions as librsvg was almost perfect earler for the non-text tests on that page.