Passepartout 0.6 released

Right. See
http://freshmeat.net/articles/view/774/

Some kind of close integration would be nice, yes. I'd would like to have some kind of close integration with gimp, inkscape and/or sodipodi, and abiword and/or conglomerate for different kinds of frames (graphic elements).

Currently, the "integration" has the form that passepartout watches external files (text / graphics), and when a file is saved passepartout reloads it and redraws the frame. I'm an emacs guy, so I edit my texts in nXML mode in emacs.

We don't really support svg graphics yet (passepartout can load them through the gnome libraries, but handles them as raster images). Recomendations for how to handle svg images would be welcome. We need to be able to rasterize them (to gnome pixbuf) and convert them (non-rasterized) to postscript and pdf. Would inkscape code be good for that?

Probably, you'd want to steal more code from rsvg than from Inkscape. Inkscape is designed to able to edit the SVG, while rsvg is based more around trying to display it. I'm not familiar with the internals of rsvg -- but I'm guessing that it is rendering to a gdkpixbuf, perhaps you could give it a PDF backend also.

If you are watching files, and then reloading them, probably a quick hack would be to just be able to click on an SVG file and have Inkscape load it. You could even pop up a little dialog saying "when finished close Inkscape" or something of the such. I know that the Scribus folks are doing something like that with bitmaps and The GIMP.

--Ted

I'm guessing that it is rendering to a gdkpixbuf, perhaps you could give it a PDF backend also.

Yep, we're looking at doing that currently. We're currently seperating parsing phase with rendering phase. Hopefully we can make it so that there are multiple rendering backends. We are mainly working on this for cairo support in future versions of gnome, but a PDF or PS backend will probably be implemented too.

Anyway, we're working on it, but don't hold your breath.

Possibly the best way would be to just convert to cairo, since there is support for multiple backends in cairo, there shouldn't be any need to implement that again in librsvg.

Then we should start using cairo in Passepartout as well, dropping most of our rendering / printing code. Unfortunatley, there doesn't seem to be a c++ interface to the cairo gtk widget yet ...

Why steal code? Just link with librsvg and you are done.

What would be nice for integration is support for DND and the clipboard. That would make it integrate nicely with GIMP (version 2.2 has pretty good clipboard support).

Actually, we do have some DND support. You can drag an image file from e.g. Nautilus into a Passepartout document.

The clipboard is also supported, although only between Passepartout instances. The problem with supporting general copy/paste is that Passepartout doesn't store text and images in the document files themselves; it only links to external files.

- the other Passepartout developer

Yes, we would very much prefer to link with a svg renderer over copying code from it. However, librsvg seems to render only to a pixbuf, and there doesn't seem to be any way to hook in another backend renderer (to get PDF or PostScript). Maybe we could contribute such code to librsvg, or maybe we could use librsvg just for screen rendering and use own code for PDF / PostScript output ...

Maybe we could contribute such code to librsvg

We'd love that... because at the moment we are planning on doing it ourselves and would be happy to get out of doing the work involved ;)

http://cairographics.org/

Sorry, forgot to log in. The above comment, "Gnome integration", is from me. And by the way, I'm one of the passepartout developers.

There is no Swedish Conspiracy.

( Fortsätta komplott, brethren. )

Whoaaa... that's bad grammar :)