Re: canvas notes

[Arjan Molenaar <a molenaar yirdis nl>]

Quoting Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>:

> On Mon, 2005-08-15 at 20:06 +0200, Soeren Sandmann wrote:
> > Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com> writes:
> >
> > > So random thoughts.
> >
> > A few more random thoughts:
> >
> > - Zooming is more than just setting a transformation matrix because
> >   the reason you want to zoom is to see more details. So somehow a
> >   model needs to be aware of how much detail should be drawn.
>
> Text is extra tricky here. Do you want zooming to show you more text, or
> do you want it to make the font larger. Even if you choose to just make
> the font larger the text object won't scale linearly with the
> magnification, because of font hinting etc. I guess you could avoid this
> by always rendering text unhinted, positioned using non-device
> coordinates, but this will cause pretty unreadable text.

You can not simply favour one over the other. I guess an application like
Nautilus would benefit from the first option (show more text), while Dia (or
Gaphor) would benefit from the second: Having text well readable at a 
100% zoom
factor, and having "unreadebly small text" at say 400%.

I found it pretty hard myself, getting the text and font stuff right (with
DiaCanvas), especially text editing. Having good support for font and text
handling is really a must.

Regards,

Arjan