Subject: Re: XP design for image support
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Apr 19 2001 - 22:38:44 CDT
On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> Mike Pritchett writes:
> >Dom -
> >
> >I know I have already thrown my nickle into the fray, but once again put me
> >on the side of a single Raster and Vector format.
> >
> >My expectation as a user is that if I insert a picture in one OS, I expect
> >to see that picture in AbiWord no matter what OS I am running. A complaint
> >about the graphic is a wrong format so it will be skipped won't do.
>
> Hi Mike,
>
> This is the best argument that I've heard so far. It's still a little flawed
> (or misstated at least), IMHO. If I was in your position, I'd be arguing for
> each particular raster/vector format to be supported on each platform, and
> not a single raster & vector format to be supported on all of them (though
> this is one way to achive such said goal).
>
> However, I remain unconvinced that embedding a JPEG as JPEG data into abi
> *will* cause this effect, just that it potentially *might*. And to date, no
> one has said "it *will* be difficult/impossible to do feature XXX on my
> particular platform" but rather all I've heard is (abstractly) "it *might*
> be difficult/impossible to do XXX one some (possibly unknown or future)
> platform" which is not a good argument, IMHO. Give me facts and figures,
> ideas and alternatives, not conjectures.
>
I guess you're (Dom that is) angling for a flyweight interface in XP land
that could be realized as either a mini-ImageMagic on Windows or the
equivalent of gdk-pixbuf on other platforms with inbuilt image support.
For Unix until we move to gtk-2.0 we will have to use the mini-ImageMagic
too.
Now I guess Paul is saying "If a platform has cool graphics support use it
to convert to PNG or SVG" then use native png and SVG to display it.
Dom says: We have IM on all the platforms we want as a fallback. Use that
to render all graphics and forget the conversion. Use platform image
renders in place of IM where avaialble.
If I'm reading you right Dom, we'll need to fork the mini_IM, put it our
tree and maintain it for platforms without graphics support. The original
design did have simplicity in it's favour.
From a practical standpoint Dom's argument has one overwhelming point its
favour. If we want SVG graphics (and I think we all do) we'll need a new
library. IM does this for us. Why not use it to do all the other image
stuff is can too. ie. Use IM as the default platform renderer for the
flyweight XP layer. Gnome uses gdk-pixbuf, gtk < 2.0 uses IM, Windows uses
IM.
If we make an efort to support mini-IM we will finally get SVG graphics
plus 50 other formats too.
So if Dom is thinking along these lines I agree with him.
Cheers!
Martin
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