SVG Import [Re: Noob can't print right on Win32....]

[Alan Horkan <horkana tcd ie>]

> I was trying to stay away from expensive bloatware by using Dia. Know of
> any good SVG viewer/printers on Win32? The only free one I've found is the
> Adobe SVG viewer and that only appears to work in IE.

there are mozilla builds with SVG support but it is not great.

To change the subject, I recently noticed that Dia.shape files are
primarily SVG (and filed some bug reports requesting that Sketch and
Sodipodi should be able to export dia.shapes).

I spent a large chunk of yesterday evening taking SVG files from
OpenOffice, and changing them into .shape files so that Dia would import
them.
All i had to do was put the svg: namespace in front of every SVG tag and
change the colour values from rgb(0,0,0) to hexidecimal values then stick
a few of the Dia <shape> tags and other bits and pieces in either side of
it.  Despite being really tedious and showing how desperately i need to
learn a good scripting language it was easy and worked really well.

How about turning on whatever SVG import there is in the next release? If
Dia is at least able to import the SVG that Dia itself exports that should
be plenty good enough to start with.  I am trying to figure out how to get
OpenOffice.org to batch convert WMF files to SVG and then i will have a
huge amount of clipart with which to test the the SVG importer in Dia.

I was also able to use the GDI in windows to paste shapes from Visio to
OpenOffice and then export them as SVG, but as Dia would not be able to
use these shapes it only served to prove an intersting possibility.
Perhaps the windows version of Dia could make more use of GDI?  (i dont
intend to file a bug report or feature request for this though).

Umm ... yeah, thinking out loud and stuff.
I had better go and finished off at least one of the sets of shapes i have
so that i can submit them if and when there is a release.
Please let there be a release soon, compiling stuff scares me *.

Later
Alan

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* not really.