SVG import


Subject: SVG import
From: Dom Lachowicz (dominicl@seas.upenn.edu)
Date: Wed Sep 05 2001 - 14:57:39 CDT


Ok, so here's the skinny on the Appligent SVG thingie:

Leonard and I have been bugfixing it lately so that we can actually ship the
product to our lovely customers. However, I have been given the go-ahead to
OpenSource our work... mostly.

What I need to do isn't too complex, but it will take a little bit of time.

1) We need to ship our product before I make these huge changes to it (will
ship RSN)
2) I wish to cleanup the code first, which will take some time :)
3) I have to remove all references to our proprietary rendering engine.
Instead, I will make a 'CallBack' or listener class which will be responsible
only for the rendering. I'll need to then make a CallBack class for
Appligent's PDF rendering engine.
4) The other things in my day job :-)
5) I'll relicense it under the LGPL and give it to the world

After that, the AbiWord community will become the maintainers of this product,
and any changes that we make *may* be rolled back into the Appligent product.
The Abi guys can change things to use UT_Strings, UT_StringPtrMaps,
UT_Vectors, ... because right now this product is stl-based and Abi+STL don't
mix. Or we can just leave things alone and still use the STL - I honestly
don't care (os/390 and as/400 are the only platforms with poor STL support in
the real-world, and even then they have STL-Port and g++ ports)

If we're not going to use the STL, I have a request that everything in
src/af/util/* gets placed into its own shippable and maintainable library
*outside* of and not dependant upon the abi/ tree. Appligent has had requests
from other people for this source code, so we want to make them happy too.
Besides, the stuff in src/af/util/ is DAMN useful code to lots of people and
should be its own library in every sense of the word. It will need to be that
anyway if we ever do an AbiCalc or AbiPresenter or whatever.

After that, we just need to write a GR_Graphics adapter class for our CallBack
which calls SetFont, DrawLine, FillRect, ClipRect, ... and then we Abi folks
should be all set.

So, ponder this over, tell me what you think.

Dom



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