Graphics in OpenOffice.org: SVG, EPS and WMF
When Heather designed a logo for me for Morphoss she did it with a bitmap editor, naturally enough because that's the tool she's most familiar with using. I'd rather not use a bitmap as the source format for the logo though, because it will degrade when it gets resized, so I redrew it as a vector graphic.
One of the best free, open-source tools around for vector graphics seems to be Inkscape and I've mucked around with it for many years, so I naturally used that.
Once you have a logo though, you naturally want to use it in documents, and the importing of SVG graphics into OpenOffice.org documents is a long-outstanding bug (let alone embedding SVG graphics) so I needed to convert them to another format. It's actually the most requested feature in OOo, appearing twice in the top 10, and even spawning an external SVG importer project.
Since both programs support encapsulated postscript I was able to save the logo from Inkscape as .eps and use it directly in OpenOffice.org. While this initially seemed satisfactory, after a few weeks of using documents with the .eps logo embedded in them I started to get annoyed with the strange pauses when my CPU was maxed out while paging up and down. I was sure that that had not happened in the past when I was using a logo in WMF format, which OOo inevitably has to support well for compatibility with other Office Suites.
After some searching around for more complicated ways to convert SVG or EPS to WMF, I discovered that what I could do was simply to open the EPS in OpenOffice.org draw, and save it from there as a WMF. This seems to work well, for my purposes anyway, so now when I use my logo in my OpenOffice.org documents I don't see any annoying slowdown paging up and down within the document, and I didn't have to download the SVG importer for OpenOffice.org either.
Well alright, I did download the SVG importer as well, but my logo didn't look nearly so good without it's text, and with everything displaced up and to the right at various offsets!
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Just FYI
A good idea but unfortunately using Draw to convert EPS to WMF is a noop. Both of those graphic formats are capable of holding either raster bitmap image data or a vector graphic. All Draw does when you save your EPS graphic as WMF is copy the EPS preview image into a WMF container.
If the EPS preview image is good quality, this may work out fine, but the WMF is still an image and has all the limitations--space and otherwise.
The slow scrolling is just a bug:
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=77068
It's triggered when an EPS graphic does not contain a preview. In that case, OOo will call ImageMagick+Ghostscript to generate one. That operation is slow and slows down OOo.
The workaround for that problem is to make sure the EPS has a preview image, added either by Inkscape (use the EPS Interchange format), or by using a utility like epstool.
The major limitation with EPS graphics in OOo is that they don't export to PDF at full quality: only the preview image appears in the PDF.
Long story short: I don't think there is any great solution. Using a plain image is a lot easier than messing with EPS and gives equal quality in the common cases. If you really need vector output, EPS is probably the best option.
Thanks for the information
That's really helpful, and as a result I've now got an eps logo that has a preview at a reasonable resolution, and which looks OK in the PDF output.
All the more reason to wish that SVG was embeddable in OOo though. I understand progress is being made, but OOo seems to be something of a parallel universe of open source software, and it appears somewhat difficult for it to use external libraries, or to be used by them.
Cheers,
Andrew.
Yikes
Wow, the most standard, professional format for most logos is eps format or better yet an eps in a pdf and it only works in a glitchy manner with OO? I don't see how professionals can honestly work with OO at this point and honestly call themselves pros if they are having to jump through hoops just to work with a basic format. I've noticed more than a few people who actively use OO recommending to change eps logos to bitmap and saying "that's fine". No it's not if you are a professional! The minute you resize a bitmap you get lossy results. You can resize eps to ANY size lossless. What pro would ever want to change an eps file over to bitmap nowadays??? I don't think OO will get any better until people get out of denial and admit that until OO has full on eps support, it's really not a professional app.
EPS in Writer
While the lack of integrated svg support is really a feature I am missing (but, if you think about it, a difficult one to implement, as svg offers a bunch of filters and transformations that are far away from what an office suite usually has to handle), your monologue about being professional is pathetic.
For professional use of an office suite, there many relevant features, but few people out there who are professionally working with it will ever realize that the pdf is containing a preview image instead of the eps vectors. Why? Because they use pdf for (screen-res) pdf distribution, and print from their office application directly. You would notice the difference if you try to layout posters or do preprint work in Ooo. But using an office suite for that is not exactly what I'd call a professional job and would suffer from a bunch of other features that distinguish a DTP suite from an office suite.
So this is a missing feature, but it makes little sense to create a pseudo-discussion about professionality.
By the way - you can also save the illustration as a native Openoffice graphic from within Inkscape. And IF you do layout and prepress, exchange between Inkscape and Scribus is well-documented.
Lars.
skencil
Though this turned out not to be your problem, I've found skencil to be very useful for conversions also, especially some formats like Adobe or Corel formats which Inkscape often refuses to recognize. There is also the UniConverter at the sk1 project (http://sk1project.org/) to help with these things.
I've found this a problem
I've found this a problem and, equally, Inkscape's minimal text tools. Both packages are still remarkably good - OpenOffice still manages to do far more 'right' than MS Office (Word in particular) - but nonetheless I'm looking forward to the respective developers improving the effective interoperability of the two programs.
It's all the more frustrating for someone who, as a longtime RISC OS user, was always used to having a vector graphics standard with very widespread support...