Dea Svenn,
>> Since you sent this gentle reminder to me, I did a web search on
>> SVG and found a lot more in the way of example code than I did
>> previously. Enough to get started on an SVG export (and possibly
>> import as well---that is, have the option to completely replace
>> PostScript with SVG). I have been experimenting with writing bits
>
> for what it is worth, I don't know if I would be happy if you
> _replaced_ the old .ps file format with a .svg. I have so far only
> used .svg to be able to get my drawings from the unix world into the
> Microsoft world. You wrote somewhere that postscript needs to be self
> content, and this has lead to all xcircuit files being viewable,
> printable and editable even if the rest of the underlying library has
> been missing. I have had problems with xcircuit and multi-file
> projects in the past, so this feature had been important to get
> schematics out for reviewing.
I did consider that my statement would be taken the wrong way. What I
meant was that most export formats are one-way streets: You can turn
xcircuit output into PDF, JPG, or whatever, but you won't be able to
get it from there back into xcircuit. The SVG format appears (at least
at first glance) to be flexible enough to encode everything in the output
file that is needed to read it back into xcircuit. It would not be a
replacement for PostScript, although if somebody wanted to work entirely
in SVG format, they could.
> Would SVG make xcircuit easier to handle in a project environment? You
> know the one where one engineer put together a module in one directory
> and another engineer binds this module into a toplevel on a different
> hierarchy? In the end, it is the netlist that matters, but getting
> there is sometimes difficult with xcircuit as the symbols of the
> missing modules are present, but that is only the self-content
> shadow, not the real thing.
I doubt SVG would be any better, in that sense. However, unlike
PostScript, it is designed to make references outside the document. If
a library of parts is a valid URI, there's no overriding reason to keep
a local copy of it in the document.
The whole idea of local and remote copies of components is effectively
a version control system. And if you've ever delved deeply into RCS,
CVS, git, and others, you'll know it's a non-trivial problem that
people have been attempting to improve for years.
Xcircuit can be set up so that a master library takes precedence over
local copies in a file. However, it is not possible to track which
objects are local and which are external, or when something has been
overwritten with a newer version. To be a proper version control
system, one would want to timestamp every version of an object, and
have access to the entire history of every object. Should xcircuit
use git or some other version control system to track changes in a
project?
---Tim
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| Dr. R. Timothy Edwards (Tim) | email: [email protected] |
| Open Circuit Design, Inc. | web: http://opencircuitdesign.com |
| 22815 Timber Creek Lane | phone: (301) 528-5030 |
| Clarksburg, MD 20871-4001 | cell: (240) 401-0616 |
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