Subject: Re: Couldn't we....
From: Martin Sevior (msevior@mccubbin.ph.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Nov 17 2001 - 09:04:32 CST
On Thu, 15 Nov 2001, Dom Lachowicz wrote:
> On Thu, 2001-11-15 at 09:32, Kyle wrote:
> > Couldn't we use GDK_PixBuf for the image importing? The only mainstream
> > format that it doesn't already support that I know of is BMP. I think
> > this would be a much easier solution than ImageMagick since we are using
> > GDK anyways. Any suggestions.
>
> This issue has already been torn to shreds, mostly by myself
> (http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/01/April/0548.html)
>
> We already use Gdk-Pixbuf for image rendering on Unix/Gnome and it's
> really quite fast (well, fast if you're not on a Sparc). The problem is
> that we want to be able to save all incoming images as PNGs internally
> and in our file format for various important reasons. GdkPixbuf 1.0 does
> *not* have an API for doing conversions or saving as different types.
> The ever-soon upcoming release of GdkPixbuf, being used in the fathom
> Gnome2 and Gtk+2 products, will have this capability. So when we port
> Abi to Gtk+2, we'll make a plugin that will use GdkPixbuf to convert
> incoming image types to PNG. Until then, everyone will just have to
> deal.
I've been thinking about this some more. I'm fairly sure that imlib1.9.11
which ships with gnome 1.4 could be used to do the conversions to png.
In fact looking at Hub's jpeg importer, it seems that all our image
importer needs to do is load into 24 bit RGB image array. Is that right
Hub? After that we can use libpng to convert that to our internally stored
png.
I'll have a look at and see if we can't do something a little lighter
weight than ImageMagick for gnome as a plugin. ImageMagick has tons of
functionality but it appears the binary is at least twice the size of
abiword!
I really like abi's fast loading time but also want to import all the
image formats on my disk.
ImageMagick makes sense for windows though. These plugin's a really
great feature. We can have the best of all worlds :-)
So for english speaking gnome users we can have a Theasuarus, a dictionary
and a nice lightweight image handling system.
Cheers
Martin
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