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

[Nicu Buculei]

Jonadab the Unsightly One wrote:
> 
> 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

In fact the RMS call was only the tip of the iceberg, OOo packagers and 
distributors, like Fedora, Debian or Ubuntu were already disgruntled by 
not being able to redistribute a complete copy of OOo (because of 
certain features requiring Sun's Java, which in turn is not freely 
redistributable).

> 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

The huge delay of OOo 2.0 was in no way related to Java, it was simply 
because OOo was just not ready for prime time, with a lot of open bugs 
(some argue OOo Base is still not ready, even now, half year after the 
2.0 release).

> 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.

In this case RMS action had a positive result: it made OOo and cgj 
developers to talk to each other and find a solution.

> 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.

It was the decision of the individual developer, he was warned, but 
preferred to use Java 1.5 because of some languages features which made 
his work easier.

>> 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.  

Do NOT use ImageMagik, the resulting PNG images will look very different 
than the initial SVG, ImageMagik has limited support for correctly 
rendering SVG. See below for a solution

>> 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.

Use Inkscape from command line and give it parameters to export as PNG. 
Automate it with a script.

A one-liner is
for i in *.svg; do inkscape -f "$i" -e "$i.png" -w 128; done
(replace 128 with your desired width)

And something more complex 
http://openclipart.org/tools/generate-thumbnails.pl

-- 
nicu