Re: Documentation and explanatory diagrams

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 10:35:41AM -0400, Greg Smith wrote:
> On 06/13/2011 09:36 AM, Rafael Martinez wrote:
> >It refers among other things to Inkscape [2]. This program generates SVG
> >diagrams and is not so difficult to use. One of the good things with
> >Inkscape is that it works with a standard format so we are not bound to
> >a specific program or non standard format.
>
> I've been staying out of this discussion so far because I truly hate
> dia, and was waiting for others to decide against it too. Inkscape
> saving to SVG is a much more reasonable choice. 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.
>
> The main issue I've seen with SVG is that it doesn't render the same
> way in every program. The attached drawing1.svg shows up in
> Inkscape with a text box and the word "stuff" in the middle. But if
> I open it in the standard desktop viewer on my Linux system, "Eye of
> GNOME", or in OpenOffice Draw, it shows a black box where the text
> is supposed to be. (OpenOffice Draw can read some SVG files, but it
> can't save in that format. Improving OOO support for SVG on import
> and export is a high priority feature for the project though:
> http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/SVG_Import_Filter ,
> http://graphics.openoffice.org/svg/svg.htm )
>
> I think that any SVG diagram might need to have QA that includes
> opening it in more than one program, to confirm the file isn't using
> a fuzzy feature in the standard that renders differently. Maybe we
> don't care, and the fact that it renders correctly in whatever tool
> is used to generate the docs is all that matters. But SVG is as
> good candidate for a storage format as we're likely to find. I've
> been trying to find an open replacement for the sort of diagrams I
> used to draw all the time in Visio in the late 90's, and tools like
> Inkscape using SVG have finally started to look good enough for me
> to consider using seriously in the last two years. OpenOffice
> completely sorting out their issues with the format is really the
> last blocker for my own purposes--it becomes much easier for me to
> justify making these when I can easily pull them in and out of
> presentation slides--but that may not be relevant to the community
> documentation efforts the way it is to my personal work.

Just want to add a +1 to using SVG as an vector graphics
intermediate-exchange format that is amendable to manual
tweaking/cleanup via Inkscape. I routinely generate graphs from gnuplot
into svg, pull them into Inkscape to add notation and tweak labels, and
generate the PNG versions from there. Inkscape runs as a commandline
tool as well - in fact if I find need the same graph multiple times,
I'll workout the arcana to add the labels via gnuplot (or via a sed step
on the svg output) and completely automate the figure generation.

Ross
--
Ross Reedstrom, Ph.D. reedstrm(at)rice(dot)edu
Systems Engineer & Admin, Research Scientist phone: 713-348-6166
Connexions http://cnx.org fax: 713-348-3665
Rice University MS-375, Houston, TX 77005
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