Re: Dumping the rendering process in JavaFX

[Phil Race]

Basically for printing we had to detect that we were printing and use a 
non-cached texture.
If you look for references to "PrinterGraphics" you might find some of them.
Canvas is one place we had to deal with this. There are at least one or 
two others.
Doing anything like only this via public API is probably an 
insurmountable challenge.

-phil.

On 11/13/14 2:49 PM, Kevin Rushforth wrote:
You could take a look at what JavaFX internally does for printing, 
which is similar to what you are trying to do. It also forces the J2D 
pipeline and had to deal with this issue. You likely won't be able to 
do it without modifying FX internals, though, which is what printing 
does in a few places.

-- Kevin


Herve Girod wrote:
Hello,

I think that more than one year ago, I asked if it was possible to 
dump the
JavaFX rendering process. More than one year later, I (or we, for I am
speaking on behalf of my project) are almost there. We use this in a
library for a "JavaFX to any format you want" converter. For example 
we are
currently able to convert a live JavaFX image to a PowerPoint slider 
(using
POI), or we also could do the same with a WMF / EMF / SVG image, keeping
the vector content of course.

What we did is hacking the J2DPrismGraphics class to render it in a 
custom
Graphics2D context which in turn can be a PPT / SVG / WMF / or EMF
serializer.

Our use case is the use of JavaFX in an Editor (no it's not a JavaFX
Editor, we edit graphic specifications for an avionics standard called
ARINC 661), and the ability to produce another Vector format with 
exactly
the same UI.

It works very well, except that of course we had to hack a few JavaFX 
core
classes to do that (obviously J2DPrismGraphics was not designed to allow
this). We did not recompile the core library, it's just separate classes
which uses com.sun classes when possible, or we used 
PrivilegedActions when
a method we needed was package protected.

But we have still a big problem (I think that it might be the only one,
except for the fact that our solution is an ugly hack, as you can see):

There is still one case where our solution does not work: Textures. 
In fact
we would have been able to convert JavaFX textures to BufferedImages 
if we
could use the Java2D-based Texture class, but of course as we did 
nothing
special, we encounter a D3D Texture (for example on Windows) which we 
don't
know how to deal with.

Which leads me to my two questions:

- Is there a programmatic way (even a contorted one) to force JavaFX 
to use
our own specific Pipeline (the idea is to be able to do this temporarily
when serializing the JavaFX content, so without having to use command 
line
argument)

- I think that it could be very useful to have a neutral and JavaFX -
supported way for developers to use their own Pipeline, even if it was
limited and with a lower than average performance. Being able to convert
from / to the JavaFX format is something that can be very useful.

Hervé