Subject: Re: WMF import (was: Re: equation editor non-image importing)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Wed Feb 14 2001 - 13:23:44 CST
At 02:53 AM 2/14/01 -0600, Sam TH wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 08:28:15AM +0000, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
>> Sam TH écrit:
>> > I think the idea would be to take the wmf image, convert it to png
>> > using libwmf and associated tools, and then display it in abiword via
>> > the png display mechanism.
>>
>> Please. Not as PNG but as SVG. WMF is inherently a vector format (like any
>> metafile), so SVG is IMHO the most natural format we should convert to.
>
>Right. SVG is the perfect format to display WMF in, and is what we
>should use.
Definitely. We've said all along that we need two and only two native
graphics formats for AbiWord:
PNG for raster images, and
SVG for vector images.
That allows core Abi logic to just port those two imaging models to all our
supported graphics environments. Likewise, importing other formats are
radically simplified, because you just have to map to them to one of these
two.
Then in our file format, all raster images get stored as base64-encoded PNGs
and all vector images get stored as SVGs. Very clean and very simple.
>> Don't we support SVG ?
>
>Not yet. Work was started on this, but never finished. Interested
>folk should look at gr_VectorImage.cpp, and at a number of emails from
>Justin Bradford that are in the archives.
>
>This would be really cool to have.
Indeed. Would someone be willing to write this up as "POW -- Add SVG
support"? As mentioned previously, SVG is a big spec, but all we really
need is something between:
- the existing GR_Graphics feature set
- the WMF feature set
This would be a very useful subset to sneak into an upcoming release, and
enough to attract developers to add more of SVG later as needed.
Plus which, it'll allow us to get started on embedding and XML namespace
issues, since the contents of the SVG data blocks in our file format will
need to be ignored and handed off to another parser.
Paul
PS: To honor our GNOME heritage, I was tempted to suggest that the POW be
labelled "Add SVG support, dangit!", but I'm not sure everyone would get the
joke. :-)
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