Hello All,
First time visit to this forum - seeking advice or solution. I am working in Win XP and Win 7 PCs and am trying to help my son salvage several years worth of his work done in Claris Draw 1.0; I can perfectly open and re-save his completed projects in Inkscape, but am trying to find out if the Claris Library files he created can be salvaged, or at least viewed and opened intact, in Inkscape(these were .clb folder in Claris-speak). These clb files are all the handy re-useable subcomponents of drawings that can be quickly called up and re-worked as needed. When you opened a clb folder you could see all the files in a kind of thumbnail format, making it quick to browse and open the pieces you need to assemble. I suspect these function similar to the lib****.dll files in Inkscape

I realize i could open every one and save it as a separate Inkscape item, but there is no associated thumbnail image that occurs on my PC, thus ever clb subfile would have to be manually renamed with a descriptive text title, to provide much hope of finding the right one each time- a lot of redundant work if there is some more elegant way, as mentioned above. Am willing to buy any product at reasonable price, but Inkscape seems capable of this -just cannot find the way.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
glatus

glatus wrote:Hello All,
First time visit to this forum - seeking advice or solution. I am working in Win XP and Win 7 PCs and am trying to help my son salvage several years worth of his work done in Claris Draw 1.0; I can perfectly open and re-save his completed projects in Inkscape

Hi,
what are the extensions of those "completed projects" you can open ? (is it .clb too ?)

glatus wrote: but am trying to find out if the Claris Library files he created can be salvaged, or at least viewed and opened intact, in Inkscape(these were .clb folder in Claris-speak)

What happens if you try to open those .cbl with inkscape ?

glatus wrote:These clb files are all the handy re-useable subcomponents of drawings that can be quickly called up and re-worked as needed. When you opened a clb folder you could see all the files in a kind of thumbnail format, making it quick to browse and open the pieces you need to assemble. I suspect these function similar to the lib****.dll files in Inkscape

How did you browse those files ?
From Claris ?
Maybe you could convert all your cbl to svg[*] and (later) browse them using file import dialog (ctrl+i). On Linux, there's a thumbnail of each svg in the import (or open or save) dialog I suppose it's the same on windows.

From windows explorer ?
Again convert those files then install an extension so that you can see thumbnail for svg such as http://code.google.com/p/svg-explorer-extension/ (don't have tested it myself... use at your own risks )

Do you know if it is a "real" folder with individual files in it or an archive with some plugins to browse the content (like windows XP being able to browse zip files as if they were a real folder)

Can you provide a screenshot of the content of such a .cbl ?

* : never did it myself but you should be able to batch convert your files see http://openclipart.org/faq#How_do_I_bat ... G_files.3F (just go from *.cbl to *.svg instead of *.svg to *.png

Vince
am working on a reply - and had it all ready to go -but when I pasted the screen shot into the reply - all my text disappeared - will try again later (suggestions on how to include screen image?) ; thanks for your help so far...
glatus

Hi Vince,
Sorry for the great delay: i have found an inelegant but sturdy work around: I simply open the Claris library and copy each library thumbnail from within Claris draw, then paste each one directly into an Inkscape Master svg; I am labelling the Masters with the same names as the old Claris libraries - such as: Faces - Body Parts - Clothes, etc etc. So now it will be easy to just open the right Master SVG and there will be all the individual component parts ready to be used (copied over and then ungrouped and edited etc)in the current Inkscape project. Nice and simple and easy to navigate and view; the only shortcoming is that I must spend a couple of hours doing step one (copying and pasting from Claris to Inkscape) but after that life will be easier.

Thanks for the useful suggestions, which I checked into and which led me to this eventual solution.
regards
glatus