On Saturday 14 May 2005 19:40, Gregory Pittman wrote: > Marvin Dickens wrote: > >Question: > > > >Is the XML format used in version 1.3 stable or will it > > change/evolve more before version 1.4 is released? Also, what is > > the possibility it will change/evolve again as development > > versions 1.5/1.6 progresses? > > > >The reason I am asking is that we want the ability to massage > > Scribus Documents in their native XML format and I do not want to > > reinvent the wheel with every new release. >
Right now freezing to a stable point is impossible to promise, nor practical to consider. Otherwise, this cuts of feature enahcements or optimizations we might find. > I think it's been pretty clearly stated that so far, the formatting > of 1.3 files is unstable, thus the admonition to not use 1.3cvs for > production work. Correct. 'admonition' is a good way to put it too ;-) > The last I checked, the original XML-like formatting of Scribus was > not considered "well-formed", at least by Perl XML parsing modules. > The problem there largely seemed to be the use of Ctrl-E as a > newline-equivalent in the files (when I got rid of the Ctrl-E, they > parsed). XML parsing presumably stumbles on Ctrl-anything. > Part of this is a Qt issue as far as I know. Fixing this means major breakage in 1.x. file import. 1.4 will have 'well formed' XML and it will be very clearly documented. > It seems to me that these "soft" newlines should not be part of the > file as saved, but simply be internalized in the way that the file > is ultimately displayed by Scribus. Once the file is transformed > to a format in which this is hard-coded (such as PDF) then the > point at which Scribus made that line break should be codified. > > I have to say that I am concerned that, from my assessment of > various Scribus-list messages, there is no plan envisioned for any > capability for Scribus versions 1.2x or below to be able to handle > >1.3x files; not even conversion utilities. No DTP I know can do that cleanly, except Illustrator and some other vector drawing apps. Note: I mention cleanly.. IME there are always some issues. However, when you "backsave" you lose higher level features. In this case of EPS, export from Illustrator 9+, this enhances its conformance to EPS specs. In my experience this is almost a necessity for working in cases like Illy 9+ > Pagemaker 6.5+. There are others I know of too. Pagemaker 6.5 can open 7.0 files, except if they have PDF => 1.3 placed in them. These cases are exceptions to the rule that "backsaving" to an older format is easily doable in DTP. > >I can understand that > there are features of 1.3x and beyond that do not correspond to > prior versions, but the result is that at some point anything <1.3x > will suddenly be crippled. One then must worry that at some point > advanced versions will then not be able to load anything <1.3x. > > TPFKAG We have discussed creating a special file loader to convert older 1.2.x docs into the new file format - if - needed. Scribus 1.2.x will open Scribus 0.4.8+ docs. Franz and I have kept quite a few old files around from various 0.X versions to test backwards compatibility. Peter
