Dear Kuba,
> PDFs handle transparency allrighty. It's just that postscript itself
> doesn't handle it by default, but does with certain extensions (pdfmarks)
> that happen to be supported by every sane PS renderer out there.
I'm not sure about "every sane PS renderer", but the usual PS renderer
in the open source world is ghostscript. According to what I just
found out by googling a few sites, ghostscript has supported
transparency for some time, but does so with its own unique extensions.
When generating PDF, ghostscript converts its non-standard extensions
to proper PDF. However, this leaves the problem of whether or not to
make use of the nonstandard ghostscript extensions in the xcircuit
output, as it is potentially incompatible with other PS rendering
engines. I guess it's just a small hack in the PostScript header for
xcircuit to check if the rendering engine supports "pdfmark" or the
ghostscript extensions, and produce the output accordingly.
> I'm talking about color lists, you're talking about element colors.
>
> Of course the outline would have a color separate from the fill.
> But the question is about what list do you select that color from.
>
> Do you have one list of colors that is used when selecting both
> outline and fill colors from, or does one want separate lists for both?
>
> Say that you always have just 2 or 3 outline colors, but 10 different
> fill colors: it may be a bit easier to maintain consistency with 2a,
> then. But I have no problem either way.
>
> Currently xcircuit has a single color list (2b) that is shared for all uses
> where you'd want a color.
As long as you're trying the approach of first getting the existing
xcircuit coded for Qt, then please don't start extending the I/O and/or
command format for new features. Xcircuit has a single color list, so
stick with the single color list for now.
And beware of the comment "Of course the outline would have a color
separate from the fill". This would also be an extension to the
existing xcircuit format, however close to the top of the feature
wish-list it is.
The whole question of transparency is a different problem, since
transparency is already an issue of incompatibility between the SVG
and PostScript output formats. I don't mind tackling the other
feature requests, either, but one at a time, please.
---Tim
+--------------------------------+-------------------------------------+
| Dr. R. Timothy Edwards (Tim) | email: [email protected] |
| Open Circuit Design, Inc. | web: http://opencircuitdesign.com |
| 22815 Timber Creek Lane | phone: (301) 528-5030 |
| Clarksburg, MD 20871-4001 | cell: (240) 401-0616 |
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