[Clipart] Gradients: sugestion

[Alan Horkan]

On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, [ISO-8859-1] Alberto Simões wrote:

> Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2004 16:35:18 +0100
> From: "[ISO-8859-1] Alberto Simões" <hashashin at gmail.com>
> To: clipart at freedesktop.org
> Subject: [Clipart] Gradients: sugestion
>
> Hi
>
> I was browsing the clipart and an idea came to my mind: we can't make
> gradients to be drawn on a rectangular box, so we can show them while
> browsing?
>
> For what I understood, the file contains the definition of the
> gradient, only. But we could add a simple box to illustrate how to use
> it.

If I thought it could be done* I would have done it but I didn't.  (* in a
way that didn't break compatibility).

I'm fairly sure adding that extra box would break compatibility with Jasc
WebDraw (I will have to double check this).  The RDF metadata already
breaks compatibilty but thankfully Bryce provided a way to strip out the
metadata as well as to add it so something similar could probably done in
this case to create sample objects using the gradients without breaking
the original gradients.

Presumably vector graphics applications (like Inkscape) will need to have
their own way of managing and previewing large amounts of gradients so it
is more important to me to have the data as compatible as possible than
easily previewed.

(Librsvg is what Nautilus uses to produce thumbnails of SVGs).  I asked
one of the librsvg developers if perhaps there could be a special case for
files containing only a definition so that it would produce a useful
preview, but he said it wouldn't be appropriate.  It was the answer I
expected but I did ask.

I believe the plan for the next release is to seperate out definition only
files (like gradients or patterns) into their own groups.  Hopefully
someone will be inspired to put together a script or tool to help make
previews.

- Alan