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

[Jon Phillips]

On Thu, 2005-03-17 at 09:53 +0000, Michael Meeks wrote:
> 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 ].

Man, we are just trying to stick with SVG files and hope that in a while
we can get to these more complex tasks like a deployable clipart package
system.

> 
> 	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).

Yes, not many SVG renderers support the whole spec.

> > > 	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 ?

I'm unfortunately swamped in tasks for contract work until after April
1st, but maybe someone else is interested in helping?

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

Students are always good to get help from... ;)

Jon

>  
-- 
Jon Phillips

USA PH 510.499.0894
jon at rejon.org
http://www.rejon.org

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