[Skencil-users] An old question revisited: Skencil as library / SVG support

[Terry Hancock]

I know I asked this question a *long* time ago, but from the traffic on
the list, I think maybe the answer has changed.

Some time ago I started work on a plugin project, which was originally
for Skencil, but as I wound up using Inkscape for a lot of work, I
wanted to make it work with Inkscape.

Unfortunately, while I had seriously problems with encapsulating and
serializing Skencil-formatted drawing data, I had essentially no ability
to *script* Inkscape from Python. So the project was pretty difficult
and very inelegant for either of these two applications.

I tabled the project, and haven't really looked at it for a year or two
because of that.

However, if I were to start up again, I'd probably try to make a program
which could plug in to either Skencil or Inkscape, and which would use
the core Skencil library to do a lot of the high-level graphics
operations (e.g. transformations). This requires there to be a separable
 Skencil graphics library.

Then I'd also like to use SVG as my native storage format for drawing
libraries (as well as output for the Inkscape plugin, of course). So,
I'd need to be able to serialize Skencil drawing data into SVG within
the program.

I also was interested in something like this for rendering of sk and svg
files on a web server, for which it would be undesirable to have any X
or GTK requirements in the library. When I tested Skencil in the past, I
found it was hard to separate these dependencies out without breaking a
lot of stuff.

The sk1 project, though, seems to have similar needs for its
"uniconvertor" program. So I'm kind of hoping that I might have an
easier time of this today.

So... here's the question again: what's the best code to start with in
order to get a Skencil-based graphics library for use from Python
program? Should I work with the Skencil sources or the sk1 sources, for
example? Or should I look somewhere else entirely?

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com