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Painter future [message #20184]

Tue, 24 February 2009 10:05

Tom1
Messages: 1301
Registered: March 2007

Ultimate Contributor

Hi everyone,

I wish to open a discussion about the future of Painter and related technologies.

The exact point I wish to address is that the Painter introduced not only a versatile software rendering engine, but also a powerful API for doing so. When writing applications producing graphical content, there are almost always multiple target devices for the content produced: Screen display, images (in various formats) and printers.

Most targets would benefit from implementing the new Painter API more directly on their native APIs for various reasons.

1. Screen display would get more speed from using the capabilities of the modern GPUs.

2. Printing on large high resolution ink-jet plotters may not even be possible without sending the content in vector format. At above 2 GB per A0 sized sheet, the ImageBuffer is just too large to handle. Sending the vector content as vectors and raster content as scaled rasters to the printer, would make a lot of sense to me -- also with smaller paper sizes.

3. Producing vector based PDF and SVG -files directly using Painter interface would be nice.

Is there a plan how the new Painter API will be efficiently mapped to the various targets?

I'm not a Painter specialist, but I guess there should be separate "backends" for GDI, X11, PDF, SVG... in addition to the current ImageBuffer rendering to get the most efficient result.

Please throw in your thoughts.

Regards,

Tom

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