Subject: Re: Gnome parts in AbiWord (was Re: GNOME Foundation/Gnome Status)
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Fri Aug 18 2000 - 13:17:39 CDT
At 1:34 PM -0400 8/18/00, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
>> I don't see the connection here. You could use gdk-pixbuf to
>>load in GIF/TIFF/etc, but you'd want/need to convert it to PNG since
>>that's the native image format of AbiWord. Then there's the issue
>>that other platforms wouldn't get those features.
>I thought that GDK-pixbuf only rendered to GdkDrawables and not to
>an arbitrary backend, though, and wasn't meant for image conversion.
>I'll have to investigate into this more.
In looking over the gdk-pixbuf code recently, it just works
with a "bit/pix buffer" (historically a libart buffer, but they
appear to be moving away from requiring libart - why, I don't know).
As part of working with those bits, it supports loading in different
image format (and writing them back out) by talking directly to the
standard imaging libs. I don't think it was "meant" for image
conversion, but it certainly supports it.
>> HOWEVER, since gdk-pixbuf sits on top of glib which we've
>>already ported, it should be trivial to just incorporate gdk-pixbuf
>>into our tree and use it on all platforms (though we'd probably also
>>have to carry libTIFF, libJPEG, etc.). Also, gdk-pixbuf uses some
>>parts of libart, but I've already ported it to Windows (and Mac OS)
>>and sent changes to Raph.
>Don't forget about the gdk dependency, and the fact that my glib
>port was *bare bones*.
Good point.
>Sure, glib, gdk and gtk work on windows and mac and beos.
Windows, yes. Mac OS, no. BeOS probably.
Porting PARTS of glib to Mac OS is no big deal (I've done a
bit of it already to aid in porting other things from the Gnome
tree), but there's a LOT of glib that we don't want/need. The same
is true for gdk & gtk.
>So does libart.
It does now ;). I just did the Mac OS and Windows ports in
the last few weeks...
>So do we make libart, the *real* glib, gdk, and gdk-pixbuf required XP?
I wouldn't recommend it - at least not all of that. As I
mentioned in a previous message about SVG stuff, using libart &
librsvg as our SVG handlers (including the SVG->PNG stuff) would make
a lot of sense. It needs a bit of glib, but probably not much more
than is already there (only "fancy" thing is it uses the hash
tables). As I said, I don't see the advantage of porting the full
glib (which includes all sorts of things we've already got in Abi's
framework) or the others.
>Then why don't we do what the gimp does and build with Gtk on every
>platform. That'd save some development time. Whoops, there goes the
>Abi framework.
>
Exactly!
Leonard
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