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Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] ImageMagick

Neil,

Neil Howe wrote:



The ImageMagick stuff is ready for testing as of
r1475.

* The image format selector looks a bit stupid. Ideas?


This is all about to change with the work Luke is doing. We agreed that
the bitmap type selector would be in the export dialog, so you can
switch the type while playing with the settings. So I guess this will
just be 1 (rather large) popup list on the dialog.

Or perhaps, since the list is so long, it would be better to have a
separate "Bitmap Types" tab on the dialog, which has a scrollable list
box?


I had a long and unproductive discussion with the GTK folks on IRC
last night about this. The summary of it is:
* They perceive the "filter" as a filter on the files displayed in
  the box, rather than a means of selecting save type. They see
  using it to select save type as an "abuse" of the control and
  thus are uninterested in fixing bugs that derive from this
  usage (I think they are wrong, but...)
* Hence they are uninterested in fixing things so the box can appear
  with "Browse for other folders" pre-expanded
* The behaviour where the GTK choicebox with the list of file-types
  on appears as a huge list, filling the screen, with the top half
  completely blank is allegedly deliberate (unbelievable, that).
* The above decisions are based on some UI guidelines that they
  now seem to be sticking to pretty rigidly (because before, noone
  was sticking to any guidelines), even though quite a few people
  think they are wrong, or (in my opinion) just don't cover some
  common use-cases (like "Save As").
* The recommended behaviour for export is to make it look like
  OpenOffice's "Save As..." box, or the Gimp "Save As..." box.
  What they do is they have a SEPARATE expander called "File Type"
  which allows you to select the file type from a separate list.
  It's possible to add an extra widget on GTK to do this, though
  wxWidgets doesn't (yet) support it. There is also an option
  to automatically add the file extension of the exported type
  if none is specified, which is checked by default (presumably
  you want to uncheck it if you don't want your file to end
  in a dot plus extension). It would be reasonably simple to add
  this expander and checkboxes to the wxWidgets GTK dialog,
  simply by overriding wxFileDialog, duplicating the code,
  and using gtk_file_dialog_set_extra_widget (or whatever
  it's called). The widget can contain a (gtk) panel or
  an expander with a panel in, so can in practice have as
  many extra widgets as you want. But you can't then get rid
  of the vestigial filter pop-up.

For bitmaps, if Luke goes the way he plans to go, then I seem
to remember we have an "export as bitmap" menu option (right?)
which then allows the choice of the filter from within the
enhanced bitmap export options dialog (is that right?). So
the "save as" dialog would then only have a single type in
(the type selected) and would not need the above. Am I on
track here?

For vectors, I /think/ where we were was a menu of "save
as Illustrator EPS", "save as SVG" etc. etc. being a
submenu of the file menu. Doing the above might make
things prettier because we could then just offer one
save dialog.


We should probably exclude some of the types that don't work well or
aren't useful. I tried SVG (presumably just exports a bitmap wrapped in
SVG?). I didn't get the export dialog appearing after selecting the
filename and clicking Save. It seemed to do the export at that point,
but the resulting file was empty. Is this really a useful option anyway?


Well ImageMagick actually support a vector format, but I just convert
everything to PNG on the way in and out so vectors get lost. And
I don't plan to change that right now.

I should /probably/ disable most of the vector format saving. Like
SVG for instance. SVG loading is useful until we have an SVG vector
loader. PDF loading is useful. Is PDF saving (as a PDF with a bitmap
in) useful (for instance) while we have no bitmap exporter? Is
EPS saving useful? Given these will all be selected from Luke's
new UI which will make it really obvious you are exporting as
a bitmap, I didn't see too much harm in these (though obviously
if they work, that would be an improvement :-) ).

As you can tell, I didn't test all 180 combinations :-)

Alex