Subject: Re: some graphic support, extra subdir, extra files, loads of Makefile breakage
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Nov 30 1999 - 13:02:07 CST
At 07:20 PM 11/22/99 -0500, Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
>>I'm not sure how good it is for
>>conversion purposes, however (ie. whether there are many utilities to go
>>from this to other formats).
>>
> Depends on what those other formats are. SVG to PDF is
>pretty easy (I've written one of these), but to something like WMF or
>PICT you are bound to lose a lot since the imaging models are so
>different.
Are we worrying about the right problem here?
Actually, insofar as we'd like SVG to be our native format, I expect that
we're more likely to need lossless conversions in the *other* direction --
from WMF or other vector formats *to* SVG.
Most of the existing clipart, etc. vector content that you'd want to be able
to use in AbiWord probably exists in those other formats. So long as we've
implemented enough of SVG to properly import, render, and store that
content, our users will be in very good shape.
Lossy conversions *from* SVG to an older format aren't likely to be a
practical problem for a while, since there's very little existing content
which uses any features of SVG, and particularly not the more advanced
stuff.
Over time, as more sophisticated SVG implementations emerge, we can evolve
our implementation to support that content. Sure, at that point people may
start encountering the problem of lossy conversions to legacy formats.
However, there's not much anyone can do about that problem, and it's a
problem users are already familiar with.
Paul
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