Re: Documentation and explanatory diagrams

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 06:36:12PM +0000, Thom Brown wrote:
> On 13 June 2011 14:35, Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> > I just created a drawing, saved it, then
> > modified it a bit.  The spurious diff from the GUI was quite small:  three
> > lines of junk with the filename change and some windowing metadata.  And the
> > new material added showed in a pretty readable diff as I would hope too.
> >  Original file and diff attached as samples.
>
> It appears you've saved it in the Inkscape SVG format as it uses
> Inkscape markup.  It's probably better to save it as a plain SVG since
> other editors may remove the Inkscape-specific markup anyway.
>
> I just did a quick test drawing a squiggly line in Inkscape, saved it
> in both formats.  The Inkscape SVG takes up 60 lines, the plain one is
> 35.  I opened both in LibreOffice and exported them back to new SVG
> files and the file lengths were further reduced, although both outputs
> were identical to one another (the Inkscape format
> LibreOffice-converted file identical to the plain format
> LibreOffice-converted file).  But this time it removed all line breaks
> and became one continuous line of markup.  So that would be disastrous
> from a delta point of view.

It's fairly easy to put those back in w/ xmllint --format. Thom, what do
you get for:

xmllint --format for_test_here.svg | wc -l

However, my copy of OpenOffice.org (3.2.1.4) does evil things to a
pencil squiggle drawn in Inkscape. The original plain svg has a single
path (albeit w/ 451 points). After passing through ooodraw, that is
broken into 760 path elements. A quick google tells me that svg export
is one of the areas that LibreOffice has advanced in. That probably
explains the discrepancy.

So, just saying 'svg' isn't enough: we'd likely need to specify Inkscape
as the one true svg processor.

Ross
--
Ross Reedstrom, Ph.D.                                 reedstrm@rice.edu
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