[Clipart] Re: OO.o gallery generator ...

[Nathan Eady]

Michael Meeks wrote:

 > IMHO the openclipart project should come up with a decent file
 > format specification for making clip-art efficient & deployable

We have already thought about this and discussed it quite a bit.
But we haven't actually implemented anything yet.

> 	The "lots of little scattered files" approach has some serious
> performance & efficiency problems; so I'd recommend:
> 
> 	[ optional zip archive ]
> 		+ a single, aggregated plain text file describing the 
> 		contents, with their names / attributes etc.
> 		+ a single large image containing thumbnails of all 
> 		elements
> 		+ [ a plurality of the files themselves ].

This is similar to what we were thinking, but we were thinking of
handling thumbnails individually, rather than aggregating them, so
that an unpacking tool could easily place them in the user's
thumbnail repository, as per the freedesktop.org desktop thumbnail
spec.  To facilitate that, we were thinking of rendering the
thumbnails at one of the sizes that specification recommends,
and in the format that it recomments (PNG IIRC).  We probably
should also include some kind of (probably XML) manifest.

>>Well, we've been pushing for OO.o to support SVG, but so far OO.o only
>>supports SVG export. Ideally, we would like the clip art to be in SVG
>>format. I wish someone would work on this for OO.o.
> 
> 	Yes - well; 'supporting SVG' is an almost unbounded task, there are svg
> renders that don't fully support SVG (AFAIK, I'm mostly ignorant here).

As near as I can determine, the key thing holding up SVG import in
OO.o right now is that the code that would have to do the importing
is considered delicate by the relevant module owners, and so they're
being careful.  (That's not necessarily a bad thing.)  There's a
somewhat technical discussion going on in issue 37213 regarding
some of the finer points of the relevant specifications (both SVG
and OASIS) and getting this import right so that it does not break
anything.  To further complicate matters, the developer who created
the patch that is being discussed and reviewed recently stated (in
another issue) that he will be leaving the OOo project.  If someone
is deeply familiar with both the SVG and OASIS specifications, this
is the place to help get it sorted out:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=37210

That issue is blocking the ones that will integrate SVG import.

> 	Anyhow - otherwise I await a contact from an interested
>  party with some minimal C++ programming experience :-)

Describing my C++ programming experience as "minimal" would be
something of an understatement.  I think I had best stick with Perl.