Re: Backend independent print function

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2010/6/12 Shai Ayal <address@hidden>:
> 2010/6/12 Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden>:
>> On 12 June 2010 09:26, Shai Ayal <address@hidden> wrote:
>>>
>>> We have opengl based printing using gl2ps from the fltk backend.
>>> The main big this not yet implemented is off-screen printing -- i.e.
>>> printing w/o opening a window. I am not sure how to go about this,
>>> since gl2ps needs an opengl context to work, and to create an opengl
>>> context, you usually have to open a window...
>>
>> VTK faces this cross-platform problem too (it also uses OpenGL). I
>> can't be too helpful about it, except that I think they use something
>> called "mangled mesa" to do offscreen plotting, or did.
>
>
> I think I looked at it way back (probably ~3 months ago. my memory
> isn't what it used to be). It's very ugly and includes distributing
> our own version of mesa with mangled names, and duplicating
> opengl-renderer to use these mangled names. Ugly.
>

I'm reading the VTK FAQ, and it seems they no longer do this:

     http://www.itk.org/Wiki/VTK/FAQ#How_to_build_VTK_for_offscreen_rendering.3F

However, I don't know what replaced it. I'm certainly doing offscreen
rendering in VTK 5.4 and the miracle of Debian packaging seems to have
taken care of all the details for me. Reading the Debian changelog for
the VTK package doesn't suggest what they replaced it with. I see
there's now libosmesa installed on my system and there's also this:

     http://www.mesa3d.org/osmesa.html

Looks like mesa now has an actual interface for offscreen plotting?