Re: Documentation and explanatory diagrams

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.

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Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
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