SVG Export Functionality

[Antonio Salazar]

Hi,

I'd like to request that Quill use SVG to save notes. This will make .quill files accessible in other programs and for all time. It will also then be easy to import Xournal .xoj files into Quill.

[Antonio Salazar (shadowfiend)]

A question worth asking here is how pages get exported to SVG. Do we export the whole enchilada, so to speak, and export all PageItems? Do we render the whole canvas? Do we drop the pages and just render their children (the actual items) as if they were on a big canvas on their own?

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

For my use case a simple export to big canvas would be fine. But, generally it's a good idea to make the export as non-destructive as possible. I vaguely recall that SVG is extensible, in which case you could add markup to indicate the pages.

[Antonio Salazar (shadowfiend)]

I just pushed up to revision 15, which adds SVG export functionality and files the PDF export and the SVG export both under a File->Export... menu. See how that plays. At an initial glance, it seems like the produced SVG is a bit too complex (too many paths) as I anticipated, but other than that it seems to be good. I'm not sure how the too many paths problem might be fixed.

[Kovid Goyal (kovid)]

Perhaps an averaging of paths, kind of what would be needed for path smoothing?

[Antonio Salazar (shadowfiend)]

But see, that's where we run into issues. Averaging paths to smooth them is fine, but then we have the problem of paths having different pressures and therefore widths. If you merge two paths into one, you lose that width information. For now, I will mark this wishlist item closed. If you want to file something on the optimization right now, go for it, but I probably won't get to it for a while. I don't have much time as it is, and there are a few things I want to get nailed down before I get around to improving this beyond the basics :) Alternatively, such an optimization might be complicated enough to merit a blueprint unto itself.

[Antonio Salazar (shadowfiend)]

Pushed in revision 15 of main (http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~shadowfiend/quill/main/revision/15).