Open Clip Art Library Integration
This is an idea for 2 ways of integrating Inkscape with the Open Clip Art Library (OCAL).
Keyed Search & Inclusion from OCAL
When the user is making a drawing, the user thinks, "Oh, I need penguin clip-art here."
It would be nice if the user could press a key sequence (Control-N, for some N,) and then type in the word "penguin." The user then has a penguin, selected, under the cursor.
If that particular penguin won't do, the user can deleted it (delete key, as usual, to delete a selected item,) and then key in a new search (Control-N, key in "penguin baby,") or tap Control-Spacebar repeatedly to flip through different images tagged (or otherwise identified) "penguin."
This idea is inspired by the way that character selection works for asian characters sets (Chinese, Kanji.)
Multi-Library Support
Ideally, the user could search from local libraries, in addition to the OCAL, or specify the library that is the source of inclusion. This way, the user can control what sorts of images will appear. (Similar to the idea of a "font," but for clipart -- ensuring that the images are the same style, license, and so on.)
Tagged image libraries is, to me, an obvious and simple way of doing this.
Automated Publishing
Have a system for saving directly to the OCAL.
The system would likely engage in a dialog with the user. The dialog would explain what is happening, allow the user to programmatically register the clipart in the public domain, and collect information about the clipart from the user (author, tags, categories, ...)
Research Notes
Greg Steffensen was working on something like this, and may be interested in developing the software, or perhaps has already implemented it; He may have a current gmail address.
- OCAL Helper, "A GTK interface for browsing and searching for clip art," registered 2005-Jun-27, source released Sep-21. Blog Post on it.
Author
This page started by LionKimbro, 2006-12-18. Please contact by gmail if you have any supports for this idea, or are interested in developing it.