Re: efficient use of canvas lines

[Ian Britten <britten caris com>]

On 19 Jul 2001 11:22:29 -0700
Loban Rahman <loban earthling net> wrote:

> Can't you create the image data in some intermediate form that keeps the
> vector data (like SVG, libart, etc.), then either render it to a
> gdk_pixbuf for displaying or postscript for printing. Hmm, come to think
> of it, that's probably what you _are_ doing.

Repeat after me:
  "The customer always has more data than memory..."  (or common sense(?))
:-)

Seriously though, for almost all of our work, we retrieve the data from
the source as needed.  We don't know whether the user may be using a single
file, or a thousand files, whether the files are 1M or 500M...
For most of our work, we must dismiss solutions that require loading 'all
the data' into memory, as we don't know how much 'all the data' may be...

Our data sources are usually proprietary vector formats (ours and our
competetors), and we have efficient techniques for accessing them, so
going back to the file isn't *too* bad...  (It does eliminate some
advanced tricks/techniques though...)

> But I thought gnome-print was supposed to make this all simple and stuff
> by providing ONE api for both. - So you just create the vector image
> data, and gnome-print and family take care of displaying it, and when
> you say "print it" it re-renders the image appropriately for printing.

We're not using GNOME - Just GTK.
Partially to minimize the number of dependencies, and partially because
we're using GTK on Windows  (Getting GTK on windows working is bad enough-
I wouldn't want to even think about GNOME (if it's even possible)...)

Thanks for the suggestions though!
Ian