Re: XPM support for NSImage

[Hubert Chan]

On Wed, 8 Nov 2006 06:30:11 +0000, Richard Frith-Macdonald <address@hidden> 
said:

[...]

> I think what Fred probably intended was to have a lot of filter
> services available for different image file formats.  Then in the gui
> library have an NSImageRep subclass which would use any filter service
> as required.  That way, the only extra code in the gui library (and
> hence linked in to apps) would be the little bit letting the
> NSImageRep use filter services.  The gui package could install a set
> of image filters, but other packages/applications would also be able
> to supply more or better filters.  When the gui needs to convert from
> format A to B it would just ask the NSImageRep to do it, and that
> would automatically pick one of the available filters to perform the
> actual conversion.

Ah, OK.  So the idea is to use the service to, say, convert an XPM to a
PPM, and use the PNM loading code that is already in gui.  Sounds a bit
inefficient, but I guess it would allow us to reuse a lot of code from
netpbm (or maybe even just create a wrapper around the netpbm programs).

This would probably work for a simple bitmap format such as XPM, but it
probably wouldn't work so well for, say, SVG, where we would want to
keep all that vector goodness, or for PDF, where the Apple API includes
extra methods like -setCurrentPage:.

But if we could take advantage of netpbm (and ImageMagick), we would
have free support for an insane number of file formats.

Another thing is, does this also allow for writing files?

-- 
Hubert Chan - email & Jabber: address@hidden - http://www.uhoreg.ca/
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