Re: Backend independent print function

[Shai Ayal]

2010/6/12 Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden>:
> 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?
>
>From my "research" into osmesa, if you link your application against
it, it replaces the system OpenGL libraries, so while you do get
off-screen opengl, you loose all the hardware acceleration for
on-screen opengl. What library is your VTK linked against? (output of
ldd $vtk_binary)

Shai