Subject: Re: image support (was Re: Core-dump during startup on AIX-4.3.2)
From: Justin Bradford (justin@ukans.edu)
Date: Thu Mar 02 2000 - 19:48:55 CST
> WHY do we want to invent the wheel rather than simply use
> ImageMagick? It's available for all/most (I don't think there is a QNX
> port) of the target platforms and it already abstracts out image stuff
> for us, especially using all the libraries.
First, I don't think the abisource people want to use it, so it's really
pointless to argue it.
Regardless, it's not difficult to redo the parts we want. In fact, it's
trivial. Really the only question is deciding how to structure the abiword
code. What are the APIs? How are they accessed by the various components
that need to manipulate images? The code to actually convert the graphics
is very small, as gdk-pixbuf shows. ImageMagick has stuff we don't want
and it introduces another library we have to link against. Given the xp
nature of the code, the fewer external dependencies the better.
> Keep in mind that supporting compressed GIF images requires a
> license from Unisys.
I thought that was only for compression, so that using libungif (which
only has decompression code) would be fine.
Justin
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