Spreading the word about EchoSVG

[carlosame]

Introduction

@DaveJarvis has made a formidable job in evangelizing EchoSVG, and for example today we have a three-figure number of visitors to the repository, so I decided to open a discussion about this.

I started this project to cover a specific need which is already fulfilled, however it would be much better for all the users of this project to reach a wider audience of both users and developers.

People want to know Why

When Dave posted out there about this library, in at least a couple of times people asked him about why the fork was created. Most visitors of the repository do not go beyond the README.md file, so I added a link to Why EchoSVG there.

Also added another link about the improved test suite, which IMO is a must-read if someone still believes that Batik is more reliable because it is an Apache Software Foundation (ASF) project.

I see that in general, there is the issue that people assume that Batik is an actively maintained project which welcomes contributions, which hasn't been the case for years.

Apache Batik status

Related to the current state of Apache Batik and other XML-related ASF projects, the issues and Pull Requests keep arriving there and being unattended. A few months ago I found an interesting post by @elharo to the Xalan mailing list which is relevant here:

At the time that the above comment was written I still had a couple of very small PRs to Batik and Xalan, and it would be odd if I had to pay someone to review them. If that's how contributions to ASF projects are supposed to work, potential developers should be warned upfront, rather than finding it after they took the time to file a PR.

Oddly, the ASF is migrating Batik's issue tracking to Github to make it more appealing to casual contributors, although they haven't discussed how this will work with copyrights (all contributors to Batik are supposed to give their copyright to the ASF, something which generally only works if they signed a Contributor Agreement).

I will keep an eye on this.

Give your opinion

This project could benefit from more contributors, so if you are reading this and have any suggestion to make about spreading the word, please do.

[carlosame]

I created a comparison image with the renders of a file by EchoSVG, Firefox and Inkscape, which could be used for evangelism:

It can be found here, with some comments: https://github.com/css4j/echosvg/wiki/Why-EchoSVG#the-fork