gnustep-dev
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Slimming down the drawing API


From: Richard Frith-Macdonald
Subject: Re: Slimming down the drawing API
Date: Mon, 25 Feb 2002 04:57:33 +0000

On Monday, February 25, 2002, at 04:15 AM, Adam Fedor wrote:

Well noone seems to be on Fred's side, so I guess I'll have to help him out :-)

I'd also agree that we should provide a higher level interface than PS, even for drawing. Remember that the PS function that we would need to privde aren't just the ones 'we' use but any power user would want to use, and some drawing functions require pretty significant PS drawing manipulations, most of which we could never hope to emulate fully, but at least we could provide a high-level equivalent that would avoid the complex PS code. Quartz, for instance, is a fairly high level drawing interface (perhaps we could model after that?).

I hope I don't seem to be arguing against Fred ... I don't really intend to.

I'm trying to express caution and a desire to maintain/improve backend consistency
while minimising support work required.

Where I say we should stick to the PostScript API, what I mean is that we should do it as much as is reasonably possible. ie that we shouldn't introduce new APIs for
the convenience of a single backend.

Short of making a wholesale change to another API (which I don't necessarily view as a bad thing, just something that I don't know of any real candidate for), I think
we should examine each case individually with some care.

It's possible that we may soon find ourselves with a new de-facto API anyway -

Fred says that we don't use the PostScript stack in xgps...
to me that seems to indicate that we are doing five fairly simple types of operation
with little in the way of complex interaction -

Window management operations

Complex curves etc using NSBezierPath

Images using a few operations

Test using NSStringDrawing

Simple lines and fills of areas


In which case, there really doesn't seem much postscript left anyway.




reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]