SVG anyone?

[Josh Sled]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2002 at 04:56:05PM -0700, Carl Parrish wrote:

| Honestly as of right now I'm not sure there are any. As I said before
| libart already has svg support. What I was asking was were there any
| plans to use a tool such as libart which would use svg to create the
| reports. 

libart only deals with graphics ... guppi takes a set of data points and
makes a graph out of it; AFAIK, libart can't do that.

The appropriate layering would want to be:

[rendered output for presentation or export
 - bitmap [png/xbm] or vector [svg/flash]]
^
|gnucash
| v - data
|guppi
| v - drawing instructions
|libart
+-/ - rendered output : graphics:bitmap [png/gif/xbm/&c.]
      or vector [svg/flash/&c.]>

| I don't know guppi don't know if it has svg support or ever
| intends to have svg support. I know that when I'm programming dynamic
| graphs svg if very handy. 

guppi's kinda dead; there's a guppi-resurection meme, and I don't know
if it'd be relevant for GnuCash or when.

| And thought that since it looks like gnucash
| uses xml pretty extensively anyways and I'm sure there must be some sort
| of xslt styles there somewhere, creating SVG reports become trivial. 

But there's a big processing step you're missing, here, which is GnuCash
transaction data [xml] -> summarized data points -> plot-graphics
description -> raster/vector graphic.

| Oh
| and microsoft has annonunced that MS Money will support SVG so I assume
| that if gnucash did as well it would be easier (though with M$ you never
| know) to import / export. to MS Money. (haven't heard quickens position
| on it so far). 

SVG only deals with vector graphics ... Saying that MS Money will support
SVG doesn't really mean anything [in general or WRT data import/export].
Whatever they implement in terms of "svg" in their data-store will likely
not contain sufficient information to be reasonably imported into GnuCash;
very importantly, "compiling" a transaction [data-]set to an SVG of a
specific graph that views the data [almost] necessarily means that you
throw information away.

It'd be the same with Intuit/Quicken.

...jsled

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