Comment 8 for bug 171054

I also wholeheartedly agree. Th only formats that should be in Save is are "Inkscape SVG" and "Inkscape SVGZ", in all the others at least some of the editing functionality is lost (even with plain SVG things such as rotation centers and probably also 3D objects now, are lost). So they should all go under Export and the nag screen should be suppressed.

So the request is two fold:

- move most of the current save as formats to export. This can be done quickly provided that we reach some agreement on the devel list. This was discussed before but never settled. I guess we should restart this discussion after the release of 0.46 and the best way to settle the debate would be for someone to provide a patch with the proposed new behaviour, so that it can be evaluated in real life

- provide the same functionality in vector export than in bitmap export. namely: batch export and export only part of the drawing. These are more long term goals and may not be as easy. cropping the vector info is a possibility but ideally it should crop only the necessary objects and completely discard the rest, which is more challenging. But these difficulties should not prevent the first change to be made as soon as possible.

For reference these are the behaviors of some graphic apps regarding save/export (please complete the list if you have access to others, Xara in particular):
Save only in native format(s) and export for everything else:
- Dia
- Xfig
- OpenOffice Draw
- Omnigraffle (OS X)
- LineForm (OS X)

Save as allow lossy formats (with a nag screen)
- Skencil. There is no nag screen proper, but trying to save as PDF from the Save menu is interpreted as an export command: the PDF file is saved but the current working file is kept as sk. Strange design decision and not one to follow IMHO.
- Karbon14: save and export present the same formats: only karbon14 native and odg on my machine (which seems odd). Don't know if odg is lossy but I guess so.

Special cases:
- Adobe Illustrator. This is a particular case: Illustrator allows to save as different formats but which are Adobe PDF, Adobe EPS etc. These files contain in fact two streams of data: regular EPS/PDF/SVG info on one side and the AI equivalent on the other (this corresponds to the "Preserve Illustrator editing capability" in the save menu). These are, from common agreement, very bad formats. When the option "Preserve ..." is unchecked, there's not even a nag screen...