Subject: Re: image support (was Re: Core-dump during startup on AIX-4.3.2)
From: Caolan McNamara (cmc@stardivision.de)
Date: Fri Mar 03 2000 - 02:07:24 CST
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
On 03.03.00, 05:08:28, Paul Rohr <paul@abisource.com> wrote regarding
Re: image support (was Re: Core-dump during startup on AIX-4.3.2):
> At 10:52 PM 3/2/00 -0500, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> >Has anyone emailed them or asked them about linking a library into
Abiword
> >for uncompressing Gifs? They might be sympathetic to an open source
project.
> It's worth a shot. In any event, we certainly should give them a
chance to
> do the right thing before seriously considering my obnoxious UI
suggestion.
> Outbursts like that are emotionally satisfying, but being polite first
is
> often a lot more effective.
> First, though, let's see how bad the problem is. If most word
processing
> formats don't include GIFs, then this may be a non-issue.
For what it is worth Microsoft Word converts all gifs that are
imported into it to
png files and works with that instead. This is the reason that wv
exports png files from word documents. I don't know if they have any
license driven reason behind it though.
While I am agnostic on the issue I think that the ImageMagick library
might be a a good library to look at. While it might appear
overfeatured, at a later stage you wil certainly want to start
cropping and resizing and rotating etc etc graphics. IM can do all of
this. And you get a stack of conversion routes for free as well. If an
external library if chosen it would be good to if it has the same sort
of editing capacities that you can see being used in the standard word
processors. If gdk-pixbuf can do most those then it would be just as
good a library to use. I would be concerned though to see abi rip the
code out of all the libraries and rewrite its own interface and set of
import entities. I suspect that it increases the amount of maintaining
that is required. Using an existing library gets you your bug fixes to
the original code fixed for you for free, adding in the code to my
mind will cause a spiraling amount of work just to remain up to date
with the originals. Maybe I over estimate the problem.
C.
> Paul,
> cooling off
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