User:Tamas Bates/NetProto

RSS Feed plugin for Inkscape

http://pzwart3.wdka.hro.nl/mediawiki/images/9/9a/RssFeedImporter.zip

A small pair of extensions for Inkscape which will download and insert the content from an RSS feed into your SVG file. Requires FeedParser.

To install: extract the contents of the zip into Inkscape's /share/extensions directory.

USAGE

The Simple extension supports some basic options to allow a user to customize the content pulled from the feed, determine whether entries should be added to their own layer groups and can attach the feed's content to a path selected by the user. The text is inserted with no specific formatting or style (it will inherit whatever Inkscape's default style is for text). To automatically attach the feed's content to a path, ensure the path is selected and the "Put content on selected path" box is checked in the Formatting options.

The Templated extension allows a user to fully customize the look and layout of the entries, but still lacks options concerning the placement of separate entries relative to each other (currently we attempt to prevent separate entries from overlapping and give each entry its own layer group, but there are no options for spacing between entries, columnar layouts, etc).

A template is constructed by the extension based on the content currently selected by the user when the extension is run. Each selected object should have its ID field set to the name of the RSS element you want to apply the object's style to. For example, to generate just a list of headlines and hyperlinks to the articles you would create two objects in Inkscape and assign one the ID 'title' and the other would get the ID 'link'. The extension would then only retrieve the ID and Link fields from the feed entries, and would style the output based on the selected objects. The selected objects don't have to be Text elements, but most formatting options for text don't make sense on arbitrary paths.

.plan
  -Better error handling and friendly error messages
   + Exit with a nice error if FeedParser is not installed
   + Don't crash if the user selects an RSS element not present in the feed
   - handle mixed case text in template objects
   - handle bad data in template objects better (log an error, but continue with the bad elements omitted)
  -More formatting and layout options (maybe some simple template support?)
   + Add separate 'Templated' extension
   + Pull only elements referenced in template objects from the feed
   + Allow added text to inherit styles from template objects
     + Handle styles on TSpan, which should override parent styles when applicable but should not cancel non-conflicting styles
     + Handle relative position data between template objects (inserted text should have same relative distance between, e.g., Title and Author fields)
   - Add support for FlowRegions (required to wrap text for long entries)
   - Add support for duplicating arbitrary selected paths in templates (to allow for layout elements to be copied for each entry)
   - Better overall layout options
     - Improve estimation of the size of a complete entry (may be impractical--the libraries provided by Inkscape do not yet support bounding boxes for Text)
     - Allow user to specify insertion point of entries
     - Add support for basic layout structures (columns, etc.)