WMF problems

[Justin Gombos <mindfuq zianet com>]

* Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> [2004-04-16 17:55]:
> 
> In the current example, talking about "wmf support" is too unclear
> and misleading for me, since it does not really say, what we do 
> with wmf.

Windows MetaFile ("WMF") and Enhanced windows MetaFile ("EMF") are
simply a file formats for representing vector graphics.  The only thing
you would ever do with (W/E)MF is use it to contain a vector graphics
specification in a file.  So it's a file i/o issue, and "WMF support"
can really only have this meaning.

The WMF problem is a frustrating one, because there are a number of
tools that claim to support it, but they're all either disfunctional
or non-trivial to install.

* ImageMagick support for WMF is read-only.

* dia for Windows requires the user to install a series of Windows
  packages in order to build a dia installer.  And that's just the
  installer.  After installing the tools to build the installer, the
  installer is then used to install dia.  I don't even want to try
  this.. looks like a fragile build process with many points of
  failure.

* libwmf builds, but doesn't work.  It has no interface, and it
  doesn't integrate as a back-end to ImageMagick or pstoedit like it
  claims.

* libemf fails to build.

* pstoedit fails with a "no back-end specified" error on both windows
  and linux.  It could be a user error, since there is no
  documentation to explain how to use it, and the syntax and semantics
  page lists every syntax element as optional.  It would really be
  nice if pstoedit developers would join the ImageMagick effort
  instead of going in a separate direction, but it seems they want to
  be able to sell their optional plugins.

Hopefully this post will help someone, because these problems are not
discussed in any of the documentation that I've been able to scrounge
up.  ImageMagick documentation writes an "r--" code next to the WMF
file format in the man page, which is a covert way of saying that you
cannot convert to WMF format- but it leads the user think the
capability is there by honoring an unsupported instruction and
producing a <image-basename>.wmf file.  The Dia documentation does not
list supported file types, and doesn't note the WMF export easter egg
in the Windows version.  pstoedit gives minimal documentation and no
examples, so it may even work, but it's unusable because of the
lacking documentation.