Re: images that play nicely with revision control?
On Sun, 09 Feb 2014 10:47:11 -0600, Richard Owlett wrote:
> Hendrik Boom wrote:
>> I'm looking for a file format for images that plays nicely with
>> revision control. Ideally I'd like to edit them while seeing what I'm
>> editing, whether it's a line drawing (like inkscape) or a pixel map.
>> [snip]
>
> You didn't say much about your actual drawing mixture. You might get
> some ideas by looking at details of *EARLY*
> versions of HPGL and PostScript.
> A couple of quick links from Google:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPGL
> https://www.swiftview.com/pclcorner/pclcorner1.htm
>
> I'm drawing on memories circa Win 3.1 and CPM-80 .
> HTH YMMV ;/
AH! The days before widespread revision control!
HPGL looks like it would fit the bill, for line drawings, anyway. If I
could get an off-the-shelf editor to read it and write it, anyway. It
dose seem to be more like object code than source code, so to speak.
It would work with revision control if I could put in newlines instead of
semicolons. Or modify the revision control system to accept semicolons
and treat them as it now handles newlines. Really, it should be possible
for a revision control to understand file types and know what's special
about them.
One workaround is to write some code that transforms between a revision-
friendly HPGl and regular HPGL in both directions, to use the revision-
friendly HPGL as checked-in source code, and to turn an existing editor
into one for this format by a shell command that converts back and
forth ...
Come to think of it, this might work with a lot of the other graphics
file formats. As long as they don't contain arbitrary identifiers that
change with every edit. I must investigate.
I've faced the same problem with word-processor file formats, actually.
At the moment the solution seems to be systems like markdown and
asciidoc. But it's easier there because marked-up ASCII text is a lot
closer to the format in which the final document is presented. It's
still text, after all.
There's opportunity for some low-level research here.
-- hendrik
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