Re: Gdk-pixbuf savers?

[Lyndon Drake <lyndon stat auckland ac nz>]

On Wed, Nov 10, 1999 at 12:06:44PM -0500, Michael Fulbright wrote:
> 
> 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.

That sounds reasonable.  One other point is that while loaders are necessary
for a wide range of image formats (so that developers can load pretty much
any image), such a wide range of savers might not be necessary.  From my
point of view, all that is necessary is a way to save a PNG.  Users can do
what they want with the PNG, including converting it to another format,
reducting the colour depth, or scaling it.

-- 
Lyndon Drake                       | Desktop:      http://www.gnome.org
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