Subject: Re: XP design for image support
From: Hubert Figuiere (hfiguiere@teaser.fr)
Date: Mon Apr 23 2001 - 16:41:35 CDT
On samedi, avril 21, 2001, at 03:43 , Leonard Rosenthol wrote:
>> The problem with IM is that it is for bitmap output.
>
> Not true!
OK. I stand corrected on this. Thanks for the info.
> IM can also write out SVG and MVG (IM's internal vector
> representation) with full vector info, along with PS and PDF (vector
> formats, but that will CURRENTLY only contain images). All of the
> "plumbing" is inside of IM to maintain vector information for different
> format (in fact, that's how SVG is handled - it's converted from SVG to
> MVG) and only at the "last minute" is the vector information rasterized
> if requested.
>
> Try this with IM - "convert foo.svg foo.mvg"
OK. So we can use IM as a backend for SVG to metafile ? That seems to
sound good. I don't know how fast it performs, but at least it helpd to
get the feature done.
>> The advantage of SVG
>> it that it is a vector format. We need to be able to use SVG natively.
>
> But do we need to RASTERIZE it natively?
Only for screen display.
>> -printing: printing is mainly a vector image processing on any
>> platform I
>> have seen.
>
> Agreed, BUT it's not that simple :(. In order to print, we
> currently fall back on OS-centric graphic API calls (GDI, QuickDraw) or
> we convert to something like Postscript (and then rely on GS to do the
> hard work for us). The problem with this approach is that none of
> these API's (except Postscript) can accurately represent the depth of
> graphic features expressable in SVG (dashes, line caps/joins, different
> types of curves, etc.). So to do SVG printing WELL, we actually need
> to do all sorts of printer querying to determine the best approach -
> which may be to generate bits.
Let alone the lack of feature of the graphic backend, since it is quite
an exception (that we should handle, for sure). Other that, if I
understand well, we can ask IM to do:
SVG -> GDI
SVG -> QuickDraw
SVG -> Postscript
hence providing a quickway print on 3 platforms: Win32, MacOS < X and
UNIX.
That is a nice news.
Hub
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Mon Apr 23 2001 - 16:41:31 CDT