[Pipet Devel] graphical API's (was: An apology...)

[J.W. Bizzaro]

> >  > My thoughts were that a CGI interface could control what the Workspace might
> >  > control.  So everything in the Workspace that would require user input, would
> >  > instead bring up an HTML form.  And everything that would return an figure,
> >  > would convert the figure to GIF or JPEG and make an HTML page for it.
> > So it is important that viewers (and possibly the figure builder) be able
> > to not only present to the screen, but present to paper (postscript?), and
> > present to graphics (PNG or JPEG). Of course ghostscript will convert
> > postscript to PNG,JPEG,...

The Gnome canvas is supposed to eventually have printing facilities.  I may have
seen somewhere, but I'm not sure about this, that this will be handled via
p/ghostscript.

Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga wrote:
> 
> If all viewers render to a gnome canvas, can't we just dump that to a
> file? I think the gnome printing api will even allow rendering to
> memory without opening an X window (I sure hope so).

Yeah.  Hopfully we can just tap into whatever printing API the canvas gets, and
convert it to JPG or GIF.

One other thing though, that we haven't mentioned recently.  I don't mean to
stir things up any more, but we should keep in mind one other drawing toolset
for Loci: OpenGL.  I was orginally thinking about using OpenGL alone, but there
are no bindings yet to the GtkGLArea widget.  Also, having worked with the Gnome
canvas for the Workspace, I realized that it gives us a lot of high-level 2D
capabilities that would be hard to do with OpenGL.  So we'll start with the
Gnome canvas, but I'd like to have a 2-part plan:

    (1) Use Gnome canvas for all 2D schematics.
    (2) Use OpenGL for all 3D models, where a 3D effect is needed.

Duh.  Pretty obvious, huh?  But let's please keep OpenGL on the backburner.  We
have 3 guys who actually wanted to work with OpenGL for Loci: Rob Harrison,
SooHaeng Yoo, and Greg Waltz.


:-)
Jeff
-- 
J.W. Bizzaro                  mailto:bizzaro at bc.edu
Boston College Chemistry      http://www.uml.edu/Dept/Chem/Bizzaro/
--