[Clipart] SVGscan

[Stephen Silver]

Jonadab wrote:

> (I had expected the zipfile to unzip into a subdirectory, but it
> just dumped the files loose in the current directory.)

OK, I'll use a subdirectory in future.

> > SVGscan needs Python 2.4.
> 
> I looked at the Python home page, but the only packages they appear to
> offer are Win32 and source.  How much of a pain is Python to compile
> from source?

I don't know, since I used the Windows installer.

> (GTK is a really serious pain to upgrade like that, but fortunately
> the GTK version you list is the version I have already, so I'm good
> there.)

I didn't list any GTK version.  Perhaps you are thinking of
Greg Steffensen, who listed Python 2.4, GTK 2.6 and PyGTK 2.6
as dependencies for his Clip Art Navigator.

> Wait a second...  Python puts the XML parser in core, so that it can't
> be upgraded independently?  Really?  I knew Python isn't Perl, but I
> had assumed it was rather better thought-through than that.  I must be
> misunderstanding something, surely...  ?

Well, the XML parser I'm using (xml.parsers.expat) is included in the
standard Python distribution, and I don't think it's really intended
to be upgraded separately.  But such an upgrade looks possible, so
I have modified SVGscan to test directly for the required feature,
rather than assuming that Python 2.3 will always lack it.

> Wow, and I was feeling bad because I'd started using the "new",
> three-argument version of open that was introduced, when, in Perl 5.6?
> I was concerned that using that might turn away some 5.005 users...

Yeah, I'm not happy about requiring Python 2.4.  But if you download
the updated SVGscan, you can use it with Python 2.3, as long as you
don't mind the missing line numbers.

-- 
Stephen Silver