Dave;
On Thu, Jan 13, 2000 at 06:31:51PM +0100, David Monniaux wrote:
> I am currently reviewing plug-ins with "real users".
Hooray for real users!
> Some plug-ins apparently and annoyingly lack much needed
> functionality. For instance, the PolarCoord plug-in insists on
> rendering into the same image as source, with same dimensions.
I think PolarCoord also has some fencepost errors. If you do a
Polar->Rect, Rect->Polar transform repeatedly, you will find that the
image starts to distort rather than simply blurring.
> So, an obvious maneuver like render a ribbon of text (say 1400x300
> pixels) then use the polar transform to make it circular does not
> work as expected, since it outputs a circle of diameter 300 pixels.
Expanding the image to 1400x1400 first would fix that. However, I can
imagine that you might want to wrap an 8000x100 image into a 1000x1000
circle, but expanding the image to 8000x8000 might be beyond your
machine's resources.
> It is not the only plug-in with that problem, MapObject also insists
> on rendering into an image of the same size.
Yes, many plug-ins are inflexible with respect to their rendering
target.
> Either
>
> 1. I have not found the "right way" to have these plug-ins render
> images of the right size. It is then very much unlikely that normal
> users will find a way to do this.
There is no "right way" right now.
> 2. The needed functionality is absent. I consider this to be a BUG
> that needs to be fixed before 1.2 is out. It is a bug because we
> feature some plug-ins that provide a functionality provided by
> decent painting programs, yet this functionality lacks some
> fundamental setting, contrary to the intuition of all users.
I think may plug-ins suffer from this problem, but I doubt that they
can all be fixed in any reasonable amount of time.
Here's another example: 'plasma' stretches the plasma to
the aspect ratio of your image for no apparent reason.
Tom
--
-- Tom Rathborne [EMAIL PROTECTED]
-- http://www.aceldama.com/~tomr/
-- "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style."
