Subject: Re: Graphic Images
From: Hubert Figuiere (hfiguiere@teaser.fr)
Date: Fri Apr 20 2001 - 09:19:39 CDT
According to Dom Lachowicz <cinamod@hotmail.com>:
> >
> >Now, I yet have to find a IMG SRC that does not point to one of the three
> >file format above.
>
> Do not confuse the idea "does not in the common case" with "can not". It's a
> very important and vital distinction. Netscape and IE also have at least the
> ability to enable plugins, making them well-adapted for situations where
> they were not particularly designed for (SWF, Java). To date, we share no
> such luxury.
You mean importing other graphic format ? Oh yes.
But I still don't understand why we should allow storing zillions of image
file format within Abiword.
[...]
> >The image problem is the same. Just seing how much image format we
> >can have in RTF gives me some headache. Even more when several of these
> >formats are duplicate in term of features. By only supporting
> >3 image format in the ABW file format, and those format being
> >standard, you guarantee that anyone can decode ABW files without too
> >much efforts. We are not closed to foreign format. We are just trying
> >to not overcomplexify things.
>
> This doesn't make the RTF (or any importer/exporter) problem necessarily go
> away. We still need to parse incoming files correctly, otherwise we're
> worthless to our users.
Who said that it goes away ? Not me. What I wanted to show is the effect
of what you are proposing: the ability to have zillion of image format used
in the Abiword format. This point is part of the spec and overcomplexify
things.
This is what I wish we could avoid. Abiword file format is not universal,
it is just versatile enough to meet our needs, as supporting JPEG, PNG and
SVG inside of it would be. Doing more would be shooting ourself in the
feets.
> For exporting, let's hypothetically suggest that RTF only supports GIF
> images and we only encode to PNG. Now, wouldn't it be easy to export to RTF
> if it was flexible enough to also allow the includion of PNG into its
> sources, via a method indistinguishable from its native GIF?
It is flexible enough to allow storing PNG actually. But there is nothing
that prevent me to modify the exporter to call a graphic exporter that
would generate BMP for the corresponding PNG so that old RTF readers can
read it. That is not the problem, and this feature is part of the exporter
stuff, hence a little bit out of scope.
[...]
> and yes, this is still second-class citizen mentality. we're refusing to
> better ourselves where it would be trivial to do so.
Perhaps we are misunderstanding each other but I find more trivial to convert
everything to PNG and only use PNG than to store and support .abw files
that contains GIF, XBM, PBM, WMF, and whatever you wish. Importing them is
a fact, actually using them is another one and it really different.
To illustrate how non trivial this would be, ImageMagick or not, have a
look at this book:
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1565921615>
it is over 1100 pages.
Hub, going back to white paper
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