[Clipart] Re: copied a clip of your OpenClipArt posting to the Schoolforge email group

[Jonadab the Unsightly One]

Daniel Howard <dhhoward at comcast.net> writes:

> You mentioned the only way currently is to use third party plugin,
> can you elaborate?

OpenOffice.org does not natively support .svg directly.  

Someone, I do not remember who, developed some months ago an add-on
that attempts to do this.  

I don't know much else about it (and am only answering because I was
asked by name; maybe someone else could answer better), but it was
discussed here on the mailing list, so a search of the archives may
turn something up.  It requires Java 1.5, which is one reason that
OpenOffice.org does not support it.  Not having used it myself, I
don't know how well it works.

> I'd like the schoolforge group to know how to set up a workaround

I don't know how to install third-party add-ons for OpenOffice.
That's not something I've ever messed with.  This is one reason why I
personally never tested the third-party add-on in question.

> until OpenOffice decides that it's in their and their user's best
> interest to link seamlessly with OpenClipArt.  

It's really more complicated than that for them.  Politically, they
can't introduce a new feature that requires Java 1.5, because RMS will
have half the computer geeks on the internet chanting slogans against
them and threatening a boycott, or worse.  It would wipe out what
little good will they have and embroil many of their developers in
pointless arguments for six months, bringing development to a crawl.
(The fallout when he raised the issue in the first place set back
OpenOffice.org development by at least three months, in my estimation,
and I'm pretty sure it would be worse the second time around.)  This
is most assuredly *not* in their or their users' best interests, at
least, not in the short term.  The political reality in the
open-source community is that RMS has more leverage than almost anyone
can afford to ignore.  (There are perhaps two or three dozen people
who can get away with telling him (politely) to leave them alone about
a given issue, without losing serious PR in the open-source community
as a result.  Torvalds is one of them, obviously; several of the major
BSD devs also, maybe ESR, possibly Jobs, ...  but it's a short list,
and nobody from Sun is on it.)

As for why the filter requires Java 1.5, I don't know enough Java to
comment on that, but I do know that the conversion is complicated and
presents certain technical difficulties, related to differences in the
way coordinate systems are handled in SVG versus in OpenDocument.
There is more detailed information about this in the OpenOffice
Issuezilla database.

> I'm considering downloading the OpenClipArt package and using
> ImageMagick to do a batch conversion locally to a file server that
> we can then access locally for all OpenClipArt images.  

The problem with this is twofold:

 1. There is no single output scale that would be appropriate for
    all of the images, as the level of detail varies considerably.
    
 2. The resulting bitmapped images would take up *MUCH* more space
    than their .svg counterparts.

> Having them load Inkscape, save an image as .PNG and then open it in
> OO is just too laborious for most of them, I'm afraid.

I understand that.  But I don't have a solution for it at this time.

-- 
Open Clip Art Library:  Drawing Together
http://www.openclipart.org/