[poppler] Annoying question: SVG output from Poppler?

[Leonard Rosenthol]

At 10:21 AM 6/5/2005, Marcus Silva wrote:
>Nothing too complex. I am used to dropping LaTeX equation from
>EquationEditor into Keynote or Photoshop in my Mac, and I have to go
>through round about ways to do similar things in Inkscape in GNOME,

         Yup, I believe that.

         Vector graphics on Linux/GNOME is still in it's infancy.  There 
has been a lot of excellent work with SVG support via librsvg, Inkscape, 
etc. - but unfortunately, the rest of the world hasn't caught up to help it.

         Hopefully the Adobe/Macromedia acquisition will help fuel SVG...


>Sometimes I wonder if the idea of using SVG as
>the content model for images in Inkscape was a good idea, but that is
>a discussion for another mailing list ...

`       Depends on what the goals of the product are.  Nothing wrong with 
SVG for screen-based graphics (in fact, it's excellent for that).  It 
simply isn't ready for prepress stuff...


> >          If that's OK for you, then there are solutions out there - you've
> > noted two, for example.  I written an SVGOutputDev for Xpdf - it's not that
> > complex an operation DEPENDING on where you put your functional limitations
> > (eg. what you are willing to give up in the conversion process).
>
>   That sounds very promissing ... Does it convert PDF text to SVG
>text?

         Yes, it does.  It makes the assumption that the font will be 
available for viewing locally. It doesn't attempt font conversion, 
text->vectors, etc.


>What are the general functional limitations beyond color space issues?

         In the case of colorspaces, it converts everything to RGB (just as 
Poppler/Cairo do).  Images are extracted in JPEG format.

         In general, it should work just fine - but I am sure there are a 
variety of issues that will pop up as folks start doing serious stuff with it.


Leonard

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Leonard Rosenthol                            <mailto:leonardr at pdfsages.com>
Chief Technical Officer                      <http://www.pdfsages.com>
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