Re: SVGCards?

[Callum McKenzie <callum physics otago ac nz>]

On Tue, 2005-09-06 at 19:35 -0400, Jason Dorje Short wrote:
> I was told gnome-games (and aisleriot in particular) used the SVGCards 
> set of...SVG cards.  I myself am trying to use these cards but I'm 
> foiled because it's all in one SVG file and librsvg does not have the 
> ability to render parts of the SVG by group, nor does rendering into a 
> large buffer and splitting it up work because anti-aliasing generally 
> prevents the cards from being on well-defined pixel boundaries.
> 
> Anyway, I looked at the aisleriot cvs code and it appears it does not 
> actually use svgcards, it uses bonded.png.  Have you tried using 
> SVGcards, or do you have plans for doing so in the future?  If so how do 
> you get around the grouped-into-one-svg-file problem?

We accept any images for the cards (which is why the SVG cards are in
one huge file). bonded.png is the default, we also ship paris.svg with
the standard gnome-games distribution. SVGCards 2.0 will be in the next
gnome-games-extra-data distribution in a day or so, an earlier version
is already there. We call it bellot.svg for historical reasons.

When using SVG cards we render to one huge pixmap and cut out the bits
we want. Since the card images have well defined edges and we draw them
on pixel boundaries the lack of anti-aliasing at the edges doesn't show
up for us. The technique is very crude, but it works for gnome-games. 

The choice of a monolithic file made sense from the perspective of
simplicity of code and the versatility of images. Unfortunately it makes
drawing the cards in the first-place an absolute nightmare. I'm
seriously thinking of changing it to individual files for each card.

I'm sure David Bellot (who created SVGCards) has something to say about
this.

 - Callum