Today I tried again importing some SVG's into OpenOffice using the 3rd party importfilter. This time it works well for me out of the box on my FC7 install, using Sun's 1.6.0 JDK. oowriter still doesn't seem to recognize .svg as an image format, but neither does it seem to recognize .odg as such in its import picture dialog. Opening the image in oodraw and copying them over to oowriter seems to work fine though. The display looks a bit jagged, but I notice the same happening with eps imports so I guess that just how open office displays it as the image looks fine in my PDF exports from open office.
Hopefully linux distro's start bundling the SVG import filter with open office. A big thanks to Bernhard Haumacher for his work on the SVG importer.
This experiment started out with wanting to import an SVG into OpenOffice, but turned into a more general test of various export/import functions in various open source Vector applications. In addition to the applications listed below I tried to get Xara Extreme to work, but I was never able to get it to import my SVG files.
For all these tests I used an SVG image called gearflowers.svg which I know is much used among the SVG rendering engine writers for testing as it is a decent performance tester. Be aware that I only used versions available in FC6 for this test, no CVS/SVN versions etc.
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| Inkscape rendering | librsvg rendering | Karbon rendering |
So the first thing I tried was importing the SVG into OpenOffice. Turns out there is still no native SVG support in OpenOffice. Found an importfilter online, but trying to import using it just cause OpenOffice to segfault.
So my next step was to try exporting as OpenOffice.Draw as I noticed that Inkscape and Karbon both claimed to be able to do this.
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| OpenOffice viewing Inkscape export | OpenOffice viewing Karbon export |
I then tried Adobe Illustrator export.
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| OpenOffice viewing Inkscape AI export | OpenOffice viewing Karbon export | Karbon viewing Inkscape AI export. Inkscape failed loading Karbon's AI export, Karbon hung trying to load its own AI export. |
Next step was trying the Encapsulated Postscript exports of Inkscape and Karbon.
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| OpenOffice viewing Inkscape eps export | OpenOffice viewing Karbon eps export |
Next thing I did was test the PDF output functionality of Karbon and Inkscape. Not finding PDF among the save as options in Karbon I ended up printing to PDF instead.
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| Evince viewing Inkscape pdf | Acrobat viewing Inkscape pdf | Evince viewing Karbon pdf | Acrobat viewing Karbon pdf |
Both Inskape and Karbon had a couple of export options which the other didn't have which in turn OpenOffice supported importing.
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| OpenOffice viewing Karbon WinMeta export | OpenOffice viewing Inkscape DXF export -white |
So this is not meant to be either a review or a truly objective test. The tests done are rather random and the results not verified in anyway apart from a quick visual test. I also have done no effort to place 'blame' for the failures in these tests. The only conclusions I dare draw from these little tests is that there is need for some more work on our import/export filters and that SVG is not yet the shared format I had hoped for it to be. The 4 renderers(the 3 screenshoted and Firefox) I used for this image all gave a mostly identical result which was encouraging although there was some small glitches, but of course a 1 image testsuite doesn't come close to tell us a full story.
As you can see from the images above the only test that seemed to achieve want I originally wanted to achieve, namely importing a vector image into OpenOffice was the Karbon EPS export image. That said it seemed to cheat doing so as the imported EPS image seemed to be a bitmap and not a vector image.(Could be OpenOffice zoom mistakenly giving me that impression though).