inkview - read SVG from stdin

[anatoly techtonik]

I want this:

    $ systemd-analyze plot | inkview

Ubuntu 18.10, Inkscape 0.92.3. Still not there.

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

Hi Anatoly,

Can you not just pipe it to a file, and then open that in Inkview?

$ systemd-analyze plot plot.svg && inkview plot.svg

I'm not sure we'd want to read from stdin by default.

[Antonio Ospite (ospite)]

I think the aim of the OP is to avoid temporary files.

A quick and dirty workaround is to use:

  $ systemd-analyze plot | inkview /dev/stdin

or

  $ systemd-analyze plot | inkview /dev/fd/0

This seems to work with the stable inkview version but not with the latest one from the master branch

A more portable solution which would probably require minimal changes, and is used by many other programs, is to detect if a file is named '-' and read from stdin in that case.

Ciao,
   Antonio

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

Hi Antonio,

Yes, using '-' would be a possible solution that would avoid defaulting to read stdin.

[anatoly techtonik (techtonik)]

Antonio is right. I want to keep my files clean.

Tried to use "systemd-analyze plot > inkview.svg && inkview inkview.svg && rm inkview.svg" but `inkview` shows blank page, so I thought that maybe the file is removed before `inkview` started to show it. I now confirmed that file is still there, but it took this long, so must be another issue with `inkview` to render it. I attached the file.

[anatoly techtonik (techtonik)]

Reading from stdin if "-" is specified is what I expected, right. But there is not --help and man page doesn't list options, so I couldn't check if it is a bug or a missing feature.

[Alex Valavanis (valavanisalex)]

Reading from stdin when '-' is used isn't implemented in Inkview. It wouldn't be too tough to do though.

[Hachmann (marenhachmann)]

You maybe don't know that there have been made lots of changes and improvements to Inkview for the upcoming version. At least the help and --version part have been worked on, see also:
http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0#Inkview

and be sure to use the development version of Inkscape for your tests, Anatoly.

[Hachmann (marenhachmann)]

Sorry, looks like --version doesn't work yet, according to Tav on the mailing list.

[Patrick Storz (ede123)]

Reading files from a pipe was implemented in inkscape in
  https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inkscape/commit/eaae266840146a0faa3332f253ba7bd63eecbb21
by adding "-" as a special input filename. (Someone should probably check if this still works after the latest rewrite of inkscape's main(), but the functionality is there in principle.)

Ideally an implementation in inkview should work the same (or both implementations should be changed to match).

[anatoly techtonik (techtonik)]

On Wed, Nov 21, 2018 at 9:20 PM Hachmann <email address hidden> wrote:
>
> You maybe don't know that there have been made lots of changes and improvements to Inkview for the upcoming version. At least the help and --version part have been worked on, see also:
> http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Release_notes/1.0#Inkview

No, I am not aware of that. Nice.

> and be sure to use the development version of Inkscape for your tests,
> Anatoly.

Is there an easy way to use it in Ubuntu 18.10? The page at
https://inkscape.org/release/master/platforms/ doesn't mention
upcoming 1.0 at all.

[anatoly techtonik (techtonik)]

Asked the question about testing development builds in inkscape-devel https://sourceforge.net/p/inkscape/mailman/message/36475173/

[Nathan Lee (nathan.lee)]

Hi - thanks for reporting this request. I've migrated it to Inkscape's new bug tracker on GitLab (https://gitlab.com/inkscape/inbox/-/issues/6180), and closed it here.

Please feel free to file new bugs about the issues you're seeing at
http://inkscape.org/report.