Re: GUADEC Results

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

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001, Joe Shaw wrote:
> Speaking of the text canvas item, I spent a good, long time on the plane
> back from Denmark reading and making notes about the new GtkTextView
> infrastructure and it seems to be exceptionally well split between model
> and view. Havoc, if you're on this list, you should be
> commended. :) Anyway, there is definitely a good amount of work to be done
> on that bad boy for the canvas, but I think that it should be fairly
> straightforward. Zooming will be tricky, I think.
> 

I'm about to add code to the Abi CVS tree that allows the abiword canvas
to be rendered into arbitrary drawing areas. You get zooming and spell
check for free with this code. We will inititally use this for
sophisticated previews of documents but of course once we get bonobo
embedding going other apps can easily use this code too. 

> > I would add a third, the GnomeCanvas.  Gnumeric and Achtung already use
> > it.  By implementing the rendering via CanvasItems, we will make it not
> > only easier to share compound documents within the Office Apps, but it
> > will be easier to integrate with other canvas apps, like evolution. 
> > Creating a library of useful canvas items should also facilitate reuse.
> > 

Actually Abi uses its own XP canvas. However if Gnome comes up with a
sophisticated and useful canvas we can use it too.

Currently the Abi canvas suffers from lack of double buffering. We are not
sure at this point whether to fix this ourselves or to wait for GTK 2.0
which will give us this for free.

> > That said, the canvas needs some love.  Bonobo canvas items are a bit
> > temperamental at the moment.  I have worked some of the kinks out in the
> > course of bonobo-draw work, but it needs more eyeballs.  I think an
> > investment of some time in the bonobo AA canvas would yield a powerful
> > rendering engine for the office suite.
> 
> Yeah. The canvas needs to be fixed for 2.0. The Dia guys have written
> their own, the Evolution guys have created ECanvas, which derives from
> GnomeCanvas, and I think Lauris has done some evil things to/for the
> canvas in Sodipodi (I admit I am rather ignorant as far as that goes,
> though).
> 

Is it worth doing our own AA stuff when this can be done via X-render in
XFree 4.0?

Cheers

Martin