Re: gEDA-user: RFC using SVG with semantic markup as an EDA format

[Stephan Boettcher <boettcher@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Clifton <pcjc2@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> On Mon, 2011-04-11 at 13:05 +0100, Andrew Seddon wrote:
>
>> 1. Be translated to common EDA formats with relatively simple algorithms
>> 2. Display nicely on standard SVG viewers
>> 3. Be easily to manipulate by tools working natively in the format
>> (this is probably implicit in 1 though)
>> 
>> Keen to hear why this idea sucks!
>
> It doesn't.
>
> Some challenges to be met though.
>
> If you make schematics == SVG files, you need to ensure that opening and
> saving from an SVG editor (e.g. Inkscape) won't break the data within.
>
> Gschem currently uses special primitives to mark connectivity - nets,
> pins, buses etc.. I'm not quite clear how that can be mapped to SVG in a
> way which doesn't loose that information when edited outside of the EDA
> tool.

Does SVG/Inkscape support layers? It sure does. I recently looked at an
svg export from gerbv, and I found it pretty useless.  I found one
object inside, and when I ungrouped that object I found all the little
pieces, but not grouped into layers.  And no transparency.

A schematic could require nets and pins to be in special layers.  When
Inkscape messes with the file, as long as the layers are preseved the
connectivity should survive.  All non-schematic layers are graphics.

So it should be easy to map the semantics of gschem to an svg subset,
allow gschem to export to such a format.  On open/import, the schematic
is extracted from those layers/groups that have a meaning, all the rest
is preserved as graphics, maybe with limited edit sorrut, like move and
delete.

If this shall become the primary format, I'd first insist on really good
native scripting support, since external schematics scripting on svg is
no fun.

-- 
Stephan


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