Re: lock unlock aspect ratio, rotation, the future? [was Re: Good job guys!!]

[Cyrille Chepelov <cyrille chepelov org>]

Le Mon, Aug 19, 2002, à 02:17:48PM +0100, Alan Horkan a écrit:

> > Similar for resize / move / rotation / ....
>
> Dia can flip some shapes.  (Flip Horizontal, Flip Veritical, if i remember
> from the object menu, middle click) I have thought about this only a
> little and i have not looked at the code but a transform is a transform so
> i suspect it would not be impossible to add rotate 90, 180 and 270.
> Rotation by an arbitrary angle and Free rotation are an entirely nastier
> problem.  Please stop me in my tracks if there is an error in my logic.

sigh.

Solving the 90° rotation is solving the 90° text rotation. 90° text rotation
is about as big a problem as arbitrary text rotation.
Solving arbitrary text rotation enables general transforms, which enables
arbitrary rotation.
(I'm grossly underestimating the text scaling issues, boldly assuming Lars
has a good handle on that now).

I wish the gtk-win32 maintainers were bold enough to add a "render rotated text"
API function (which shouldn't be very hard to implement on Win32), and 
implement it on X as a g_warning("FIXME: X sucks at rotating fonts"). Just
to get the things in motion.
 
> Obviosly rotation is a feature that people want.  Eventually would the
> plan be to improve diacanvas or somehow replace it diacanvas2?
> I know that font issues and GTK2 are the main goals for the forseeable
> future but i would love to have even a vague idea of what the future plans
> might be.

First, deliverying a GTK2 initial release that doesn't crash significantly
worse than 0.90. One of the things needed is to finish porting the export
plug-ins (all of them) so they don't output invalid files (neanderthalian
file formats like CGM or TeX lack knowledge of Unicode, or advanced things
such as selecting the name of the desired font, they need some baby-sitting).

Then, there are several directions to go, all of which need to be eventually
done anyway:
        * HID compliance
        * bringing back EPS support on Win32
        * getting rid of UML Class (not the object, but the property dialog 
        implementation)
        * internally nicer EPS output (though visually, it's excellent
        compared to the limited font and character sets we had in 0.90)
        * rotations


        -- Cyrille

-- 
Grumpf.