Talk:File types

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Revision as of 17:18, 11 May 2007 by Yfarjoun (talk | contribs)
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Freehand and CorelDRAW?

Illustrator is the most popular vector graphics package in the continental United States, yes. But in Indonesia, at least, CorelDRAW (most of Java and Sumatra) and Freehand (in Jakarta and other major cities) rule. I don't know about the rest of Asia, but I suspect similar. At the very least one cannot doubt that these two apps are popular.

Supporting them would be good, methinks.

CorelDRAW in particular. Especially since CorelDRAW's basic interface was inspired by the original Acorn Archimedes version of Xara X, which some say also inspired Inkscape. It would suggest that the learning curve moving from CorelDRAW to Inkscape would be slightly flatter.

--Lemi4 07:40, 10 March 2007 (UTC)

Latex via pstricks

I find that the "save as latex" leaves something to be desired. I was wondering what other people thing about this. Listed are my top items concerning this:

1. Since Inkscape cannot read a .tex file, saving as .tex qualifies as an "export" and not a "save as". Notice that after saving as .tex the active filename changes, and subsequent saves will be to the .tex file. You will thus lose the changes since you will not be able to work on the file. To avoid this one must save as .tex then as .svg to avoid losing the changes.

2. The actual export isn't 100% compatible with the original document. some things cannot be avoided: PS doesn't support transparency thus the alpha is ignored. However the user should be warned when the document has items with non-zero transparency. But other things are amiss: draw a white square with a white frame and export to latex and you will see that the result has a black border. Is this a bug? (I submitted a patch for this bug --Yfarjoun 17:18, 11 May 2007 (UTC))

3. The whole "point" in exporting to latex is the ability of including formulas or at least labels. The best would be to be able to write text and have it _not_ rendered in Inkscape but rather passed straight through to latex with a \put command. This will users to place complicated text in the result without having to lay it out carefully in Inkscape. Currently text is exported explicitly (strokes etc) to pstricks.

I'm willing to help with this, but Id like to hear what people think about it first. --Yfarjoun 13:53, 26 March 2007 (UTC)