Re: Gdk-pixbuf savers?

[Michael Fulbright <msf redhat com>]

federico@redhat.com said:
> Saving is a lot harder that loading.  With loaders you can always
> promote image formats to something nice like RGB or RGBA.  With
> saving, you cannot do that.  Saving an image requires a lot of
> information about the file format you want to use, and duplicating
> everything that the image format libraries provide does not make
> sense.

> So if you want to save images, use the image format libraries.

I would have to disagree.  With well documented interfaces to the various
saver modules there is no reason you could not use a named argument
system to communicate with the modules.  When you save an image you
know the format you are using, so following the documentation you can
pass the desired arguments which apply to that module. This is no
different than how the various canvas items are handled, for example.

And saving from RGB/RGBA to the various image formats is certainly if
anything simpler than reading those formats into a RGB/RGBA buffer.

Jonathan, Federico and I talked about this week and we decided the
primary focus is to get all popular formats loading first, so then the
people working on migrating gnome-libs et al to gdkpixbuf can proceed
quickly.  But I would urge before too long we should add a interface for
saving.

Dr Mike