Re: Word attachment...on linuxtoday

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Michael Meeks wrote:

> 
> Charles,
> 
> On Wed, 2002-01-16 at 19:22, Charles Iliya Krempeaux wrote:
> > Is the sodipodi engine separated out into a library?  (And if so, then
> > are there any docs about using it... besides the source?)
> 
> 	No - read the source; check the module out from CVS, and hack wildly at
> it; if you want a library - make it a library; quite why you'd want to
> make it a library I know not. Mostly people dislike dependencies in
> libraries, and sodipodi is a relatively sane project that doesn't
> re-invent the wheel (badly) before achieving it's goals, and thus has a
> number of Gnome dependencies.
> 

What we need is a library to draw onto a generic graphics
context. Actual implementation of draws would be done by subclasses.

Regarding re-inventing the wheel, we'd MUCH rather (and we have a long
history of) stealing GPL code.

However both rsvg and sodipodi have issues for the people doing most of
the work on this. (I won't do much. My time will be spent stealing code to
implement Tables :-)

These guys want a lGPL library because they want to use it elsewhere. rsvg
and sodipodi are GPL. Also both are written in C which makes stealing code
hard for C++ projects. The pure virtual methods fits more neatly into
a C++ framework. rsvg also depends on libart-lgpl which appears to be
unmaintained. (Please flame and correct me if I'm wrong.)

Speaking of re-inventing the wheel, does the Evolution team plan to use
wvHTML to render MS Word docs into in-line HTML for Evolution? wvHTML
handles tables rather well and is part of the gnome-office library.

I would love such a feature myself.

Cheers!

Martin Sevior