Re: Graphos news

[Riccardo Mottola]

Hi,

William F. Adams wrote:
> On Thursday, July 11, 2013 5:58:55 AM UTC-4, Riccardo Mottola wrote:
>
> That last makes me curious though --- why a new  file format?  Why not use 
> serve existing standard?
>
>   I'd be thrilled if you would use Metapost as a file format for instance. I'd 
> dearly love a tool like Tikzedt which would allowed one to switch between 
> coding and direct drawing.
I just enhanced the GDraw format, the "father" of Graphos, of which the 
current application is essentially a deep restructured and rewritten 
version: the core itself is the original one, Graphos should be able to 
open the original files, even though now it has a different format since 
0.3: it correctly saves ordering and will so enhance on it in the 
future, where I try to retain read capability of a couple of previous 
versions, but no write capability.

Why this format? One should ask Enrico, but the answer is almost 
certainly that it i s very convenient in GNUstep to write such a file. 
It is a Plist, for which GNUstep has native tools to do reading and 
writing and the format itself is closely a serialization of the 
in-memory representation.

Nothing prevents in the future to add Read and/or write capabilities for 
other formats though. Interesting projects for the future, if somebody 
wants to step in and help? I think it would be a matter to read the file 
and "convert" it to the plist needed in pieces, since each object is 
capable of initializing itself from a set of properties.
Now that "zoom" has been factored out of each object as a separate 
property, this is more doable, 1 month ago it would have been a pain, so 
I'm happy to have tackled such work.

For now I want to complete the basic "debugging" and addition of the 
most basic needed features. It has been already a long journey!

Riccardo