Re: Volunteer for developement of presentation tools

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Mon, 18 Jan 1999, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> 
> Does your new framework contemplate the affine stuff?
> 
> I am interested in being able to rotate the rectangles for example
> ;-).  It would be a shame to ignore all that power in the AA canvas.
> 

It's in the TODO file. I want to do it as in Excel, where you can choose
the "rotate" tool and get a little rotation handle on the item. There are
some complications, for example if an item has a drop shadow simply
affining the drop shadow won't do the right thing. Excel does the shadows
correctly.

One question (also mentioned in the TODO file) is whether to make EZPaint
support Gdk-mode operation in addition to AA operation. For example, the
Gnumeric canvas is a Gdk canvas, no? AA can also be a bit slow for
interactive use, though it's impressively good it's decidedly less snappy
than Gdk, test-gnome will confirm this for you. Also, apparently you can
do stuff that hits worst-case algorithms. My grid-lines vector path takes
libart a full minute to clip for some reason. (fixing this is in the TODO,
don't worry ;-)

Anyway, point being if you depend on affine transforms things won't work
in Gdk mode, so that could be an issue. Rotation would have to be disabled
in that case.

Havoc