Subject: Re: Graphic Images
From: Matthew Kirkwood (matthew@hairy.beasts.org)
Date: Thu Apr 19 2001 - 17:05:47 CDT
On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
My take on this stuff is that it would clearly be great to
support as many image formats as possible, but I have an
absolute horror of the situation where I can, without
noticing, make a document on one platform which cannot be
loaded on another.
Thus, anything in the file format must be supportable on
all platforms. Otherwise, conversion is the only option.
Borrowing Mr Rohr's hat for a minute, there's also the
issue that "native" support of these formats significantly
raises the bar for new platforms -- an otherwise complete
port would be unable to consider itself "done" until it
supported all image formats.
> 3) Just not support GIF, JPEG, TIFF, XPM, XBM, etc... This is
> absolutely horrible.
The alternative isn't a lot better -- it adds significant
complexity (though not on the surface) to the file format,
and raises the bar for new ports/platforms.
I can see the arguments for supporting both jpeg and png,
but I think that other formats should be converted to either
of those for saving.
Consider TIFF. It's a *huge* file format. I have heard it
alleged that there is no one implementation of all of the
options in the specification, let alone the extra bits that
always get added. Supporting TIFF like supporting OLE
structured storage and claiming that you have a word importer.
With that the way it is, it would be easy to get into a state
where the file format and common (or even all) platforms
supported TIFF images. But we might easily find that an
ImageMagick-based importer could load (and thus save, or at
least copy to file format) an image which any gdk-pixbuf (or
Imlib, or ..)-based one couldn't.
Matthew.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Apr 19 2001 - 17:06:02 CDT