Common vector effects interface

[ivan louette]

It's me again with my fancy ideas ;-)

Perhaps could it be very interesting to develop an interface for vector effects plugins (I mean effects like fractalize, add or displace points in Inkscape) wich could serve in Inkscape as well as in Xara LX. The latter lacks of this kind of effects at the moment (Xara allways privilegiate bitmaps effects and plugins). That could encourage the programmers who would focalize on this kind of effects.

kindly,
ivan

[accessD]

As you probably know, I wrote few programs to manipulate vector drawings.
Such things are made with built-in scripting engines (VBA in corel, SHEME in Inkscape (I believe), something else in Illusrator).
There is no such scripting core in Xtreme yet.
So, such vector processing tasks could be done only with file or clipboard transfer now. There is XARLib which can place Xara data in clipboard.
So plugin process can get it from there and process, then put them back in clipboard.

The problem for me is that XARLib is writen in C++.
Im not familiar with C++ and I hate classes and such a object oriented stupidity. So simple thing like parsing library - and it should be written in
OOP manner???

So Im trying to write own library with Delphi. There is problem again - errors in documentation in TAG_PATH description and the worst thing - undocumented use of ZLIB. (Header is stripped as I understand).
So I cant decompress ZLIB block. And whole process of writing Delphi library stops.

This is sad story.

P.S. The other sad story is that there are no library for Delphi capable to handle subpixel coordinates. I.e. you cant rasterize pixels with non-integer coordinates. So you can see real picture of you output inly in Xara.
(Probably that's why CDraw is so luscious piece of code..)

[ivan louette]

Hi Dmitry,

I didn't know you were active in this area. Many thanks for your reply. I am not a programmer and because of that I understand only partly what you write, but I think I understand what you mean.

Actually what you have done with your external applications is fantastic. That could be already a must if these ones could be ported to Linux.

I understand the XARLib problem. Don't you know if that part of the work could be done in a collaborative way with the community here ?

Perhaps the subpixel question shouldn't be a priority ?

kindly,
ivan

[accessD]

1) Actually what you have done with your external applications is fantastic. That could be already a must if these ones could be ported to Linux.

2) I understand the XARLib problem. Don't you know if that part of the work could be done in a collaborative way with the community here ?

3) Perhaps the subpixel question shouldn't be a priority ?

1) Modern Linux (GUI part) is too bulky for me now.
All that GTK, QT etc. are written in C++ and are damn slow.
No pleasure to deal with them.
Also I have no computer capable to handle both Windows and
Linux with developer setup.

2) Dont think so. I have no skills in collaborative work. And I have
too weak Internet connection to deal with this.

3) It is important. It you saw my RASTER app, you could note
that gradients are displayed in different way in RASTER and XARA. That because in RASTER I can't draw circle with radius = 2,5 but In Xara I can.
This is limitation of GDI.