Subject: Re: Graphic Images
From: Hubert Figuiere (hfiguiere@teaser.fr)
Date: Thu Apr 19 2001 - 14:30:13 CDT
On jeudi, avril 19, 2001, at 08:47 , Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> This was the original plan. Was it a good one? I'm not so convinced of
> that.
I'm convinced it is. We should support internally 3 image format. SVG
for vectors, PNG for bitmaps, and JPEG for JPEG and arbitarly other
lossy compression format. (yeah, it is a real waste to store JPEG as
something else than JPEG).
>
> If we choose this route, we have *few* options:
> 1) Roll our own conversion classes. This sucks.
Yes.
> 2) Use IM or some other lib to convert FOO->PNG. This kind-of sucks
> because of the various overheads needed for the translation. Plus we
> presumably could use this lib to render stuff to screen instead.
This is the easiest way as the ABW file format, that will contains such
images, will stay simple and limit itself to 3 image format. Have a look
at the mess of RTF and Word. To fully support them, we need to support
PICT, WMF, DIB, BMP, JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc. That is a real pain. In the 3
format mentionned, handling the last 2 of them (PNG and JPEG) will be
walk in the park given the fact that JPEGLib and libpng does the stuff,
and that the various platform even have built in renderers (see
gdk-pixbuf). SVG must be supported as XP, but more on this later.
Conversion is done once (or twice, because of the preview in the open
file dialog). That's all. Once imported it is in one of the 3 internally
supported format that we know how to handle. Period.
> 3) Just not support GIF, JPEG, TIFF, XPM, XBM, etc... This is
> absolutely horrible.
Nope. That is the reason of 2. Convert the image on entry, like we
ALREADY do for word processor. Yes, actually opening a file and saving
it as RTF is not a safe (ie lossless) process. Same for all the other.
Hub
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