On Sat, 5 Feb 2000, Andreas Beck wrote:
> > > The purpose of the file-target is to transparently render a LibGGI
> > > application's output to a file.
>
> > And the application's output can be _anything_. And "anything" means, that
> > this could be also a screenshot for example, which is usually saved as
> > *.pcx, *.ppm or something like that.
>
> That is the idea, and that is already possible with the file target. Have a
> look at doc/targets.txt . The target itself will only write the simple raw
> and ppm formats and has hooks to externally convert them.
>
> > > Making it _read_ files does not gain you anything over any other
> > > approach, and is plain wrong.
> > No. You can easily write a ggiviewer for example (have a look at the
> > attachment).
>
> Yes. But thinking closely, Marcus is pretty much right.
>
> I have for now only argued with respect to bloating the file target.
> While IMHO a p?m loader wouldn't add much bloat, Marcus is right with the
> "we need a good image loading library anyway" argument.
Not a only loading library. He said:
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Image loading should ideally be written as two libraries:
One library that does not use LibGGI and does not know about visuals.
It should dynamicly load readers/writers for different image formats,
and read images into/write images from it's own simple structure
^^^^^
(basicly just width, height, format and a pointer to the data). It
should also be able to convert images between different formats.
The second library should be a simple glue-layer between the first
library an LibGGI. The reason to make two libraries that a generic
image loader/writer that is _not_ tied to any graphics/window system
^^^^^^
is badly needed, and the first library will be just that.
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So when we write two libraries, to load and save images - Should the
file-target then be removed?
Christoph Egger
E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
