ANN: ongoing emf+ parser & rendering rework

Thorsten Behrens thb at libreoffice.org
Thu Jul 20 01:00:36 UTC 2017


Dear fellow hackers,

as of Saturday, a first cut of a new emf+ parser & rendering framework
from Armin has hit master (thx to Moggi and Stephan for fixing up the
ODR / unit test breakage fallout!).

The old implementation is a source of significant pain & issues
(separate implementation, only able to render into offscreen bitmaps,
no real vector, incomplete import etc etc). There have been various
efforts & plans in the past to address that (some of the heroes of
fixing the existing impl, and those interested in a rewrite in Cc) -
so I'm most happy to announce that the Technical University Dresden /
Germany stepped up & in the person of Prof. Oliver Sander is funding
this re-factoring.

That out of the way, here's how to play with it & hack it:

* in recent master (Tuesday or later, to avoid unit test issues)
* get yourself a dbgutil build
* either change in the cxx, or set in the debugger:
  bTestEMFPDecomposition to true
  (drawinglayer/source/processor2d/vclpixelprocessor2d.cxx:500
  currently)
* of course stick an emf+ graphic into your document ;)
* for directly comparing old vs. new, also set bUseChangedColorObject
  to true (gets you a blended overlay for new and old renderer)

Right now, it's all pretty bare-bones - technically, wmf/emf/emf+
parsers have been moved to emfio, and code is in place to convert wmf
& friends data into a vector scene graph just like svg is currently
imported & rendered. End-to-end, currently only polygons and colors
are working though - any help to expand functionality there
appreciated. But the framework & preparation work has landed now,
including carrying the original binary files around for proper
roundtrips, and holding a buffered preview graphic for quick repaints.

Next steps (again, help much appreciated!):

- add more GraphicPrimitive generators, complete up to a state that
  the filter at least covers what the current direct canvas renderer
  delivers:
   * clip regions
   * text rendering - it's parsed, but graphic primitive generation is
     missing
   * gradients/hatches
- once this works, cut over to new impl, bin the old code in cppcanvas
  (there's sadly a small amount of duplicate code now in the parsers)
- iteratively expand, to cover near-100% of EMF+ (mostly lacking around
  gradients & effects):
   * more complex fill types like bitmaps/tiles
   * path gradient
   * xor & stuff

Cheers,

-- Thorsten
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