[Clipart] Re: OO.o gallery generator ...

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Jon,

	Some great questions :-)

On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 17:26 -0800, Jon Phillips wrote:
> On Sat, 2005-03-12 at 20:43 +0000, Michael Meeks wrote:
> > 	I don't believe I've publicised this, but I'd love to be shipping the
> > openclipart (sadly rendered to bitmaps) with Novell's OO.o -
> > unfortunately the gallery construction process is rather painfully
> > baroque.
> 
> Yes, we would like that as well. Is our process or the OO.o way
> painfully baroque? So by baroque you mean which process is too
> complicated?

	No - the OO.o gallery file(s) format is horribly gross. IMHO the
openclipart project should come up with a decent file format
specification for making clip-art efficient & deployable [ there is
quite a barrier to entry here ].

	The "lots of little scattered files" approach has some serious
performance & efficiency problems; so I'd recommend:

	[ optional zip archive ]
		+ a single, aggregated plain text file describing the 
		contents, with their names / attributes etc.
		+ a single large image containing thumbnails of all 
		elements
		+ [ a plurality of the files themselves ].

	If there is a standard, then it should be easy enough to get the OO.o
gallery code to read it - and - hopefully, we can avoid having multiple
copies of this data across the disk in random different encapsulations
[ as we will have to do for OO.o at least initially ].

> > 	http://go-oo.org/ooo-build/patches/test  [ the gallery * ]
> > 
> > 	This is the start of a utility to import a scad of bitmaps into the
> > nasty binary theme file format that up-stream OO.o love ;-> [ in lieu of
> > some nice, standard, sensible format ;-]
> 
> Well, we've been pushing for OO.o to support SVG, but so far OO.o only
> supports SVG export. Ideally, we would like the clip art to be in SVG
> format. I wish someone would work on this for OO.o.

	Yes - well; 'supporting SVG' is an almost unbounded task, there are svg
renders that don't fully support SVG (AFAIK, I'm mostly ignorant here).

> > 	I hope that's interesting to someone, my work has lapsed for a little,
> 
> Yes, that is very interesting. So these are patches to the current head
> of OO.o? What should be done with them? Are there instructions anywhere?

	These are patches vs. any src680-m79 build tree [ as produced by a
recent ooo-build-1.9.79.x release; the tool is built inside the build
tree - if it were improved to the state of usefulness [ mostly just a
matter of adding some command-line argument parsing, & some more error
handling ], then we would prolly ship it as a tool in our OO.o packages
to allow easier gallery construction.

> Would you like help with this? How can we support these endeavors? Will
> these patches get applied to the main OO.o code, or only Novell's? Is
> Novell's OO.o the same as the old Ximian one?

	So - when we have something workable, there should be no problem
getting it up-stream, until then, it's best to hack about in ooo-build
[ which also makes OO.o rather easier to build ].

> Thanks for your work...very cool! Our project is helping to catalyze
> some interesting tools and sub-projects. It would be good if we could
> help in some way.

	Sure - since I have little time to work on this, and the task is
~almost done, I was hoping for someone to perhaps pick up this work &
finish it, now the hard stuff is done. Jayant - perhaps this is a
suitable NOSIP task - if you have a known-competant, slightly
experienced, dedicated NOSIP student I can mentor to complete this
that'd be really helpful - can you point them my way ?

	Anyhow - otherwise I await a contact from an interested party with some
minimal C++ programming experience :-)

	Thanks,

		Michael.
 
-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot