Easily Editable Vector Graphics
Make it easy to save a file from the vector graphics program of your choice and upload both the source and rasterized versions. Ideally just upload the source and the server takes care of the rendering using image tags just like it does for .png and other raster formats.
- SVG (inkscape)
- Omnigraffle
- Illustrator
- Visio
Plan
- Port http://www.communitywiki.org/OddmuseToInkscape to work with our wiki
- Figure out something similar for Omnigraffle (how does one go about building an extension for omnigraffle?)
- Figure out something similar for Illustrator (how does one go about building an extension for illustrator?)
- Figure out something similar for Visio (how does one go about building an extension for visio?)
Is there lossless conversion to/from SVG for each of these programs? How about for PDF?
Progress Report
The idea, as I understand, is to allow users to edit their uploaded images from their personal wiki pages. One crude way of doing this is that the user downloads the image file to his local drive, makes changes using whichever editor he/she likes, and then uploads the edited image file back to his wiki page. So the motivation here is to prevent the user from this drudgery of sorts.
The most likely scenario we want to incorporate is that the user clicks on the edit link for an image file and a graphics software program of his choice opens. The image file gets downloaded from the server into a temporary local file. The user is then free to edit the image as he likes. When he/she hits the save button, the image gets uploaded to the server. This results in a better user experience when he edits an image file.
Mediawiki claims to support external editing for all filetypes and the mechanism it uses is pretty similar to the one mentioned above. It requires a helper application to run on the client machine that handles all the data acquisition and networking issues plus the web browser's configurations need to be altered. Here's the link for details on this approach: External Editors Support in Mediawiki
The other approach used by the Oddmuse wiki is to allow users to externally edit the images by opening the graphics editor and specifying the exact name of the image as it is stored on the server side. This hard dependence on the user knowing the exact name of the image file on the server has put me off this scheme. Also, this plugin will have to be written for all existing graphics softwares.
Whereas, in the case of mediawiki's approach, you only have to write a helper application and make no plugins for each and every graphics software program.
Hence, my vote goes for the mediawiki approach. I need your take on this Brandon.
- I agree with your thinking Ali. Let's go with the MediaWiki external editor approach.
