Subject: Re: Gnome parts in AbiWord (was Re: GNOME Foundation/Gnome Status)
From: Justin Bradford (justin@ukans.edu)
Date: Sat Aug 19 2000 - 02:28:41 CDT
On Sat, 19 Aug 2000, Martin Sevior wrote:
> Paul Rohr thought about this a lot and I believe that what he wanted was a
> gdk-pixbuf like front end for abi that would call up arbitary image
> conversion libraries from either platform libraries (gnome,BeOS, Win,Mac)
> or abi if those libaries were not present. This infrastructure was never
> put in place.
Just a quick note on this:
The image importers all return a PNG version of the original data, whether
that data is from a file or a bytebuf. That should cover our needs for
import, both standalone images directly and images embedded in other
formats. I make use of the BMP importer in the Word importer, for
example.
However, the interface does not map particularly well onto gdk-pixbuf, due
to an efficiency "problem" in general. We decode the various formats
into a generic block of pixel data, re-encode it as PNG, pass that through
to the gr_image code, which decodes the PNG and then builds a
platform-specific blitting-ideal buffer.
One could still use gdk-pixbuf in the importer to get the plain pixel
data, and then encode that as PNG to pass through the system. It's
wasteful, but no more than the current system, and also not currently a
performance critical piece (unless you're loading tons of images, of
course, but even then, it's probably still negligible).
In summary, this problem can be fixed with some thought and refactoring,
but it's probably not worth anyone's time at the moment.
Justin
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