Subject: Re: vector graphics support (was Re: image support (was ...))
From: Leonard Rosenthol (leonardr@lazerware.com)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 19:09:47 CST
At 01:19 PM 3/2/00 -0800, Paul Rohr wrote:
>The obvious candidate here is
>SVG, which has managed to be both bloated and immature, but still seems to
>be headed for PNG-equivalent status among vector-graphic formats.
Given it's backing by the W3C and all the major players in graphic
software, it WILL become the standard - at least in terms of XML & the
web. And given it's goals, I don't think it's all that bloated.
>Clearly,
>adding enough GR_Graphics support for an XP implementation of a reasonable
>subset of SVG would be a cool feature for AbiWord.
Yeah it would - but it's also a LOT of work since the core graphic
element in SVG are curves/paths (bezier and quadratic) and none of the
target platforms have built-in primitives for these. So someone needs to
write/find/port code to "convert" from these complex mathematical entities
to an "array of points".
>In the mean time, I believe people were considering doing lossy conversions
>from vector formats like WMF directly to a raster representation (ie, PNG).
>That way we could still display those images, even though any future ability
>to edit them properly would be lost.
I never suggested they be lossy, just that we convert to PNG for
display in order to reduce the total amount of changes to AbiWord. I
think that the original data needs to be kept around for editors - and the
same technique will also work for other "embedded technologies" like the
equation editor.
>I'm not sure how many vector graphics formats are in common use, but the
>more of them there are, the more appealing path (a) sounds, because all the
>rendering work gets done once downstream for all formats, and the first step
>is just translation.
I would say that there are at least three major ones - SVG (for
the future), WMF (Windows) and PICT for MacOS. I would guess that Unix
folks have one, but I don't know what it is.
LDR
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