Hier geht's zur deutschen Version

This is a reimplementation of the Inkscape generator plugin by Aurélio A. Heckert, which can be found here: http://wiki.colivre.net/Aurium/InkscapeGenerator

I did this for two reasons:

• It's difficult to run the original extension on Windows, since it is implemented as a bash script and uses commands like head or sed. The new implementation is done in Python and uses only standard features of Python and Windows.
• The original extension has problems with correct parsing of CSV files when it comes to characters like , or ".

Installation

Windows

Copy generator.inx and generator.py to C:\Program files\Inkscape\share\extensions (global installation 64 bit), C:\Program files (x86)\Inkscape\share\extensions (global installation 32 bit) or C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\inkscape\extension (single user installation).

This extension needs Python 2.7, which is shipped with Inkscape 0.92.1 or later. It also works with Python 3, which is shipped with Inkscape 1.0 or later.

The 64bit Windows version of Inkscape 0.92.1 has a bug which causes Inkscape to freeze when using this extension (#1659172). If you experience problems with Inkscape freezing, please use the 32bit version or a newer version (0.92.2 or later).

The following is NOT available on Windows:

• Progress bar and cancel button during generation process
• Output to JPEG format

If you want JPEG output, you can install ImageMagick and modify the Png_to_jpg function in generator.py as follows (replace Path\to\convert.exe with the correct path to the convert executable):

def Png_to_jpg(pngfile, jpgfile):
    Call_or_die(
        [
            'Path\to\convert.exe',
            'PNG:' + pngfile,
            'JPG:' + jpgfile
        ],
        'ImageMagick Converting Error')

GNU/Linux

Copy generator.inx and generator.py to /usr/share/inkscape/extensions (global installation) or /home/<username>/.config/inkscape/extensions/ (single user installation).

The following software is requires:

• Python 2.7 or Python 3
• Zenity (for better user interaction, the script will work without it)
• Convert (from the ImageMagick suite, for JPEG export)

Incompatible changes

Some details of the usage of this extension differ from the usage of the original extension:

• In the Bash-based extension, you had to escape certain characters in your CSV file. For example, you had to write \\\\& to get a &. With this extension, you need to write simply & (with handling of special characters enabled) or & (with handling of special characters disabled).

• In the Bash-based extension, the characters [, ], , $, ' and " were replaced by an underscore if they appear in a column name. For example, when you have a column named "first name", you had to use %VAR_first_name% as placeholder. With this extension, no such replacement occures. Your have to use the placeholder %VAR_first name%.

• This one is only important if you used generator.sh not as an inkscape extension, but called it directly: In the bash script, there were some parameters with a dash (i.e. --data-file). In this python script, there are no dashes in the parameters (i.e. --datafile).