Re: SVGLoader and policies

[Bernhard Herzog]

Roman Joost <address@hidden> writes:

> During spending some time at the SVG loader and playing around with some
> methods, I'll find it usefull to add a new class which handles the style
> lookup better and adopt some CSS work if needed.  That means, the
> methods of the SVGHandler care more about the 'construction work' of the
> shapes and the styling class cares about how the shapes will look like.

Feel free to rewrite the entire plugin.

> How is this basically handled in the sketch project. Is it more 'program
> as you think' or should I better ask when adding classes and moving
> methods?

Depends.  In the particular case of the SVG filters, radical changes are
no problem, and there's no need to ask.  If I had the time to work on
them I'd probably redesign at least the import filter more or less
completely.  Changes to the core are a different matter, though.

> What python version do you prefer and can I use new-style[1]
> classes?

That depends on whether the code is for 0.6 or 0.7.  0.7 CVS depends on
GTK+ 2 now and uses PyGTK 2 which requires at least Python 2.2.  So for
0.7 Python 2.2 is the base Python version for now.  I think using new
style classes is OK for 0.7.

0.6 currently is still Python 1.5.2 compatible (maybe even 1.5.1, but I
haven't tested that in years).  I don't really test with 1.5.2 anymore,
but I do test with 2.1.  I think it wouldn't be a problem to move to a
newer base python version for the next 0.6 release.  I don't know which
one would be best, but moving to 2.2 as well might be the easiest thing
to do.  That only means that new code (which should be limited to the
plugins and scripts) and bug fixes do not need to be compatible with
older Python versions, of course.

> There is also a little wish. It would be really nice to have TrueType
> font support. I browsed the mailinglists a bit and found the hint to
> curvetext and JapaneseText. I also found a reply from Bernhard
> Herzog[2], who was considering moving to GTK2 with PANGO support, where
> skencil is currently developed in. Well, what do you've in mind and what
> are the plans for a nice font dialog (-support).

I don't have anything specific in mind, since I have very little time
for Skencil these days.  Some general thoughts about fonts and text
suport in Skencil:

 - The CVS version of 0.7 already has moved to GTK 2, so it wouldn't be
   a problem to start making use of Pango.

 - At some point we should move to unicode.  Using Pango makes that easier.

 - TrueType should be supported

This has some consequences and raises some questions:

 - File format: Switch to UTF8 for text encoding

 - How to identify fonts, esp. in the file format?

 - How much control do we have over fonts in Pango?  Can one tell Pango
   to use a specific font file?

 - How do we print text that uses TrueType fonts and/or Unicode?

There's probably more that I can't think of at the moment.

   Bernhard

-- 
Intevation GmbH                                 http://intevation.de/
Skencil                                http://sketch.sourceforge.net/
Thuban                                  http://thuban.intevation.org/