[Clipart] SVG in OpenDocument

[Alan Horkan]

On Tue, 12 Jul 2005, Jon Phillips wrote:

> Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 16:07:31 -0700
> From: Jon Phillips <jon at rejon.org>
> To: Open Clip Art Library list <clipart at lists.freedesktop.org>,
>      Inkscape Development Mailing List <inkscape-devel at lists.sourceforge.net>
> Subject: [Clipart] SVG in OpenDocument
>
> Hello all,
>
> Would anyone be interested in following up on the problems between the
> OpenDocument format and SVG?

I really hope someone with more techincal authority than me will step up
to this and I want to thank Daniel for tackling it (the OpenDocument
format is huge and scary).  It is a shame that OpenDocument seems to be
moving even further away from SVG in an attempt to support more features
when what we would like to see is it moving more towards SVG.

Would be great to be able to throw the main.xml from an OpenDocument at an
SVG parser and get some reasonable results.  The potential for XML formats
to degrade gracefully is an interesting one and if OpenDocument was
constructed as SVG with extras instead of new format vaguely resembling
SVG it could work and potentially exploit a much wider variety of existing
tools.

> Mental, you seemed most versed in discussing these issues previously. I
> fear we are too late! OOo is geared up with OpenDocument support and I
> noticed that Krita and other KOffice apps already support the format.
> Man, why couldn't OpenDocument just use SVG man...ugh!

Krita is the Paint application.
I'm almost certain it is not using OpenDocument.

Karbon 14 the draw application is not using OpenDocument yet and is
currently without a maintainer.  If we have any enthusiastic C++
programmers interested in improving the SVG Importer for Karbon (and the
exporter too) it would really help.

KChart will not be using the OpenDocumetn Draw format but rather it will
be using a Chart/Graph format from OpenDocument.  KChart provides SVG
export using the built in functionality of QPainter in QT3 and this is due
to be improved later in the QT4 development cycle.

> Inkscape will need to support import/export of OpenDocument in the near
> future. http://books.evc-cit.info/odbook/book.html

Work is being done by INdt on behalf of Nokia to improve the OpenDocument
support in both Abiword and Gnumeric.  There will be quite a lot of
potential for code reuse when that work is more advanced.


> > I'm sure that getting the format fixed will be a slow process. I've
> > never heard of a standards body that did things fast. But I do want to
> > see the format fixed.

> > As for myself, I'm slowly reading through a book on OpenDocument, so I
> > can have a better idea of what I'm talking about:
> >
> > http://books.evc-cit.info/odbook/book.html

Here's hoping this all works out.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

Inkscape http://inkscape.org
Abiword http://www.abisource.com
Dia http://gnome.org/projects/dia/
Open Clip Art http://OpenClipArt.org

Alan's Diary http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/