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Inkscape Project News, Announcements Interoperability: LibreOffice and Inkscape
  1. #1
    Lazur Lazur @Lazur
    *

    Our development team asks:

    How can we improve interoperability between Inkscape and LibreOffice?

    Tell us about your workflows combining LibreOffice applications and Inkscape.

    What works well for you, what doesn't?

    We are always looking to make collaboration with other Free and Open Source applications easier for you!

    Let us know in the replies.

    (Replies will be processed outside of the forum.

    We may not respond here individually due to time constraints - thank you for your patience!)

     

    (via: inkscape vectors)

  2. #2
    Tyler Durden Tyler Durden @TylerDurden

    My memory may be failing, but I seem to recall being able to copy charts from Calc and pasting them directly into Inkscape.  I'm not having much luck doing that recently, so I save the charts as svg files and open/import. 

    Thanks for any insights.

  3. #3
    Lazur Lazur @Lazur
    *

    Just the other day I went on and on how it takes 10+ times more effort filling in a billing form than printing it on paper, using a ball pen for filling and scanning the thing.

     

    While libre may be able to open the pdf -never tested- it can hardly handle pasting in graphic content without destructing the layout and gives a headache to move things back to normal manually.

    -Libre needs layers. It's that easy. Lock text content away from the graphic content. Responsivity most of the time is a disadvantage in practice.

     

    So, went the other way around, opened the pdf with inkscape.

    Text may be messed up  with the kerning, grouping may make no sense for humans and what not.

    -Inkscape needs an option preserving the pdf without breaking it apart. Like embedding the pdf document into <pdf></pdf> tags or as foreignobject or whatnot, with an appropriate scale factor

    and shield it from any direct editing.

    Semi-related issue: the text tool and its handling blows. Besides the various and unorganised gui options when you about to me a selected text object slightly by clicking and dragging, you end up deselecting it or selectiong an object under. It's a headache for the user to zoom in than back out just to perform something that trivial and even when zoomed in, you cannot see where you are moving the object, only the selecting part more clearly. 

    Calls for an immediate fix I'd say -if the text is converted to a path at the same zoom level with same accuracy you can select it with ease.

    For the text tool there are other very basic features never implemented. 

    Making the object origin automatically follow the text anchor. Just because I  change the font I don't want to reposition the text object. Every. Single. Time.

    Since we are talking about a graphic program and inkscape has the feature creating fonts, a way to render text baselines at least would be helpful.

    Probably easier to implement than rendering ascenden and descendent lines, "X" height as those aren't stored in the font.

    Without that it's eyeballing really to match two kinds of fonts within an image. 

     

    Then another big issue was to export a flattened, multipage pdf from the drawing.

    Multipage pdf was imported, multipage pdf is needed when exporting.

    Maybe I'm missing something but ended upusing the exporting options batch exporting to pdf.

    Not ideal for calling it in the export panel and there were several naming issues with it when I tried. 

    Didn't find to create a multipage pdf so needed batch exporting pages then stitching those outside inkscape.

    Used pdfsam basic for that. However seemingly simple task I don't want to deal with creating unnecessary temporary pdf-s for each page,

    focus on their naming, then importing and arranging them correctly for the stitching and come with another name for the stitched version.

    What if it was a book with 300+ pages? It makes no sense.*

     

    Lastly regarding pdf-s and other "top secret" content, for privacy and copyright reasons we need an option to save into a flattened version.

    Just with printing the pdf on paper, filling it with a ball point pen and scanning it, preserving the appearance is the key and locking away the editability.

    Both programs need an export to "flattened" pdf, where each page consist of a raster copy of all of its contents with various settings 

    for resolution and image format -preferably jpg with a noticeable lowered quality. So whenever original authority is the question, 

    you can provide a crystal clear, editable copy when asked for it -but prevent forgery or fraud.

     

    After these are fixed, for interoperability, I'd also like to see ways to copy/paste image objects selected from inkscape to libre 

    and ways to do the same with text objects the other way around.

    As far as I can imagine both would be better handled with a container object. 

    Libre would need to implement the same renderer of inkscape (to render like filtered objects or masked/semi-transparent, gradiented objects and not just flat fills as in eps or wmf).

    Inkscape would need better handling of text objects -preserving anchor points, linking objects with the same text baselines etc.

     

    Personally I can't see how the scope of this idea gathering could do any good for the mentioned issues as they'd take 2-3 years fixing at least 

    and chaning the renderermay also be a bigger one.

    Those are my 2 cents anyway.

     

    (*In reality ended up batch exporting the pages to raster images at a given resolution, 

    importing them back, scaled them and positioned them back to their original order, 

    deleted the rest, original contents

    batch exported to pdfs and stitched it to a multi-page pdf as it'd be in minutes IF printed.

    So many extra miles to take if you don't have a printer or an effortless scanner at hand.

    Wouldn't say to save the trees by it because the time taken to avoid printing

    also means an increased energy consumption in comparison.)

     

    Edit:

    OK, saving as pdf saves multipages without the extra need of batch exporting and stitching.

  4. #4
    rauferd rauferd @rauferd

    Interoperablity between Inkscape and LibreOffice has been notoriously bad in the past. That is really disappointing, if not frustrating, considering that we are talking about two of the most wellknown and most used libre/open source software projects. Users (private and commercial) who use one of the two tools very likely use the other one, too, at least occasionally.

    I work with both pieces of software a few hours per week for at least ten years.

    In my case, maybe one third of my Inkscape drawings (created from scratch, imported from pixabay etc., or generated with gnuplot) ends up in a LibreOffice Document (mostly Writer or Impress) sooner or later. Most of these SVGs contain text and/or arrows (requirement: same font, size, and style as in the main LibreOffice Document).

    As a naive user, I would expect that I can just drag an drop any Inkscape image in my LibreOffice Document and it should look no different. However, I can hardly remember any image that would work this way.
    Instead, I got used to lots of workarounds: Convert text to paths, export to PDF or plain SVG, separate things in different layers or all in the same layer, group and ungroup items, etc.
    None of these worksarounds work fine in all cases, though. So in all these years, I ended up spending a significant amount of time trying different quirks to make to two documents, one OpenDocument and one InkscapeSVG, work together (when by themselves both documents were already finished, pixel-perfect, production-ready).

    It makes me very happy to read that you care about this issue.

    Having said that, please let me know if I can be of further assistance (example files, formalized user stories, screenshots, bug reports - all is possible if you have a few weeks of patience).

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