Subject: Re: XP design for image support
From: Hubert Figuiere (hfiguiere@teaser.fr)
Date: Fri Apr 20 2001 - 03:27:31 CDT
According to Martin Sevior <msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au>:
>
> 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.
The problem with IM is that it is for bitmap output. The advantage of SVG
it that it is a vector format. We need to be able to use SVG natively. Several
reasons come to mind:
-dynamic resizing: you don't resize a bitmap bu vector. actually this can
be worked around by re-rendering the SVG to the newly sized bitmap.
-printing: printing is mainly a vector image processing on any platform I
have seen. This means that with if we choose IM to render SVG, we will
loose the SVG advantage when printing. Printing is a resolution agnostic
process. We have no idea of the resolution of the printer, etc. Why do you
think Postscript has been invented ? Why do you think we actually have the
GR_Graphics classes ? We could have greatly simplified the layout drawing
by rendering everything in a bitmap, no ? But we would have had jaggy result.
So it is exactly why we need an XP way to use SVG as vectors.
Hub
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