Subject: Re: Graphic Images
From: Dom Lachowicz (cinamod@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Apr 19 2001 - 20:06:42 CDT
Matthew Kirkwood 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.
It wouldn't be "un-loadable", it just runs the risk of being lossy. We are
already @ this point WRT available fonts.
>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.
I don't see this as a problem.
1) What new ports are we going to add *right now*?
2) Platform parity is a nice goal, but it isn't 100% true even now, the time
I'm assuming that you mean all platforms are relatively equal. Everything is
always in various stages of "completement." It all comes down to how much
we're willing to allow to slide/get added on certain platforms and why we
allow this to happen.
> > 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 fail to see why. One the surface, we would see:
<d mimetype="image/png"> -> <d mimetype="image/tiff">
Which doesn't look all too complex to me. Underneath, all we have is
basically the same as for our current importers/exporters:
recognizeSuffix
recognizeContents
recognizeMimeType
Again, not terribly difficult. Use some shared lib to draw to the screen
(ala GdkPixbuf, IM, QuickTime, OS primitives) and you're home free.
>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.
The file format would be common. How well do we want to integrate with our
host platforms and are we willing to sacrifice some extra effort to do so?
Dom
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Thu Apr 19 2001 - 20:06:47 CDT