Re: RTF in the canvas?

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

On Fri, May 11, 2001 at 10:07:55AM +0930, Not Zed trolled:
> Canvas makes a pretty slow and jerky presentation platform anyway (but
> Unix/X is the fault there).

"slow and jerky presentation" is certainly not intrinsic to Unix,
nor to X, nor to the combination.  If you have specific technical
suggestions for improving performance, I'm sure they will be welcomed.

You might also like to look at rasterman's "evas", which is neither
slow nor jerky, and uses X.

Moving the aa canvas to using the X Render extension will help a lot.
Perhaps in the future a libart-based X extension could be written,
so that we could have paths/shapes entirely on the server.  Of course,
Gnome would still have to work when these extensions were unavailable.

Yes, I wish NeWS had won, and I also wish the technical advances and
lessons had not been lost - many of them are being rediscovered slowly
and painfully today.  One reason NeWS lost was because the source was
not readily available and Open/Free (you could buy it from Sun for
$300 but not redistribute it, and probably there was an NDA).

Maybe the Berlin Consortium's code will become a replacement at some
point, although they will have to have good X interoperability
before anyone other than games players will be very interested :-)

Today, we have to work with what we have.

Lee


-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001