Preview - more haggling

[Michael Meeks <michael ximian com>]

Hi Chris,

        Thanks for cutting the CC list down to something sensible :-)

On 10 Dec 2001, Chris Phelps wrote:
> Did you not read the rest of the mail? Did I not say 200x300 pixels?
> Yes those are rhetorical questions :-)

        Possibly we should have two aspect ratios, portrait and landscape
- just to make life difficult for you :-)

        As background - Windows saves a 'wfm' file - a Word Meta file,
essentialy an API dump of the rendering primatives. Thus if you have a
complex document - it can take forever to render, and is somewhat of a
pain.

        _But_ - this does have some advantages - namely, that when the
document loads; it's not neccessary for eg. Word to fire up Excel - it can
just use the wmf stream to render it. This can equate to quite a large
saving I imagine.

        So - yes a png is a very nice way to do the serialization - but
it's possible that we want to store a gnome print meta-file in there
instead :-) - either way - we would want to generate the image with
gnome-print almost certainly in the first place.

> To clarify more:
>
> 1 preview on the screen, to the left of the file list. It is fairly
> good sized, and would hold scrollable (if the document is that long)
> data in it, looking approximatly like a print preview version of the
> document (most likely no pagination)

        Sure.

> My general impression would be that *most* projects would provide
> their own viewer component, but that some other stuff, such as
> proprietary software could have 3rd party code written to render
> things to a canvas pretty simply.

        The problem with activating eg. gnumeric simply to render a file
that you just clicked on - is that it's going to take 'quite a while' TM.
Whereas, simply pulling a serialized gnome-print metafile out and
rendering that - is going to be fairly quick I think.

        Either way - the thing to do is to hack something up and play
with it and then iterate the design I think :-)

        I'm most pleased that you're hacking on this - don't get bogged
down in a quagmire of endless discussion :-)

        Regards,

		Michael,

-- 
 mmeeks gnu org  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot