Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Xara's feature

[Alex Bligh <alex@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

--On 19 February 2007 09:56 -0500 bulia byak <buliabyak@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> http://inkscape.org/screenshots/gallery/inkscape-0.45-gradient-mesh-exper
> imental.png
>
> By the way, this screenshot is a good illustration of the universality
> of simple Gaussian blur - you won't be able to do anything like that
> with Xara's "feathering", but only with true blur.

You can simulate many of these things using transparency including the
bitmap in question (I agree feathering is no use here but why would you use
that?); though personally I'm a fan of mesh fills and think Xtreme should
have them. In the end this comes down to a "how many ways to you want
of being able to achieve (roughly) the same effect?" - personally I think
mesh fills make quite a few things easier, though I am not sure Charles
et al agree.

Re Guassian Blur, you can do this in the commercial version of Xtreme
through live effects, which is a generalized filter mechanism that operates
at given level in the rendered bitmap (perhaps you didn't know about that
as it isn't in the open source version); you can do Gaussian Blur through a
trivial plugin - i.e. you end up with a shaped object that acts (in this
case) like a blurry lens. The main reason this doesn't work (yet) in the
open-source version is that noone has yet written an interface to use
(e.g.) GIMP plugins. This is what I intended to do (but never got around
to) as it would also allow Windows photoshop plugins to be used on 32 bit
Intel Linux platforms. However, all the infrastructure is there.

By the way, if you can render and interpolate sufficiently fast, you
shouldn't need the blur step. This can be important when some aspects of
the (mesh) filled object (other than the outline itself) need a crisp edge.

Alex