[Inkscape-devel] Re: [Scribus] Scribus cmdline import/export (patch)

[Bryce Harrington]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 04:16:40PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-09-24 at 23:26 -0700, Bryce Harrington wrote:
> > However it occurs to me that another solution would be to simply give
> > scribus some commandline options for doing import/export.  E.g.
> > 
> >     scribus -i filename.eps -e filename.svg
> 
> This has been desired for a long time. See
> http://bugs.scribus.net/view.php?id=238 . We're still not at the point
> where that's quite practical, though we're certainly getting there. 
> 
> Being able to do it without an X-server and with a low startup time may
> well be post-Qt4-migration stuff though (Riku will know much more than
> me about this).

I was thinking about this too.  With Inkscape when we first started
doing intensive commandline stuff, we had some branches of code that
relied on X for error dialogs and such, but did it anyway, and sorted
out the X issues later.  They're annoying, but straightforward to
solve.  A converter that requires X to run is certainly superior to no
converter at all...

For purposes of conversion, startup time is really a secondary issue;
it probably isn't worth it as a driver for you.

> > I looked into the scribus code a bit to see how this could be
> > implemented.  I wasn't sure how to call the import/export plugins
> 
> As chance would have it, that's something I'm going to be working on
> soon. There's just a pile of university stuff to deal with first.

Cool.
 
> For importers/exporters that already have plugins, you can use the
> plugin manager to call them. There's code in fileloader.cpp for that,
> but it might be a bit tricky to follow.
> 
> The general approach you could take is:
> 
> #include "scplugin.h"
> #include "pluginmanager.h"
> 
> ScActionPlugin* plug = dynamic_cast<ScActionPlugin*>(PluginManager::instance().getPlugin("importps"));
> if (plug)
> {
>     bool result = plug->run("/path/to/PS-file-to-import");
>     // Act on result code
> }
> else
> {
>    // Inform the user that you couldn't do what they asked because
>    // you couldn't access the required plugin.
> }

Okay, if I get time I'll investigate this.

> There is currently no good way to enumerate supported formats, etc,
> automatically. That's planned, though, and should hopefully happen
> during 1.3.2cvs development.
> 
> Once that's done, your TODO should simply become a call into FileLoader.

Thanks,
Bryce