Because everything's started from here for me.
I won't go into details of how I got into these scripts, but I learned many things. Started by using CLI, shell scripting, reading open source projects, understanding XML, regex, image manipulation, and so on. I think those have given me the foundation regarding my career development.
It has been a decade since I found it. I often googled SVG build, but the results are not related to my expectations. I just feel that I don't want it if this good thing is just gone. So, this is an attempt to keep it alive.
A few years back, I got plenty of time to play around and modify the scripts. I can't recall all the details, but here is the list that I still remember.
- Removed dependency of external ImageMagick. Python Image Library package is used to replace executable files of ImageMagick (convert and identify).
- A GUI desktop app. GUI desktop app was built using the PyQt4 framework.
- Add more options. I added options such as fullpath, fillpath, closepath, top, page, combine, camera, line, frame, backward, but I don't remember the usage of some options above and the reason why I added them in first place XD.
What next?
- Documentation. First of all, to summarize all the problems above, I think proper documentation is needed.
- Revert to a non-GUI app. Or at least the modified version could be more modular and run without the dependency of PyQt4 because I got troble last time I tried to install PyQt4 on Windows 10.
- Remove Inkscape executable dependency or recreate as an Inkscape plugin or do both. Inkscape is open-source but to extract a function from the source maybe is not an easy task especially if the function requires one or more external libraries. As for making SVG Build as Inkscape's plugin, inkstitch probably could be a good reference.
- Recreate with another programming language. Golang with its concurrency probably one of the good choices, but I haven't found library that equal lxml in Golang.
- SVG Path Morphing. It would be nice to add this effect as option to SVG Build.
- Conversion feature from a raster image to a vector image. Inkscape already has a feature for converting raster image to vector but in my opinion, it's still a very basic feature. Creating an external conversion is another big topic and I think deep learning is needed to achieve this.
All the list above is just some of my thoughts. I just want to write it here. I think many more things can be improved. Hopefully, there will be someone to take a look at the code and play around with them.
If you are still curious about SVG Build, take a look here for more.