[sword-devel] Re: Maps, etc

[Chris Little]

On Thu, 12 Dec 2002, Martin Gruner wrote:

> > IMHO, PNG support along with PS or PDF support would be wonderful.  PNG is
> > great for pictures and the like, and PS is great for scalable maps and
> > diagrams.  It would work to our advantage to support multiple formats,
> > methinks.
> 
> 
> As Daniel already pointed out, this aint gonna happen until somebody goes 
> ahead and takes charge of it.

To comment on both messages, I don't think anyone should take charge of
handling specific graphic format decoders/rasterizers or anything of that
sort.  I think we need to move towards simply using good HTML renderers as
displays.  GnomeSword & BibleTime probably already support much of the 
functionality we should strive for.

Regarding formats, we should probably support PNG, JPEG, and SVG.  I don't
feel PDF is particularly well suited to this task and I don't think we
should be incorporating PDF decoders in Sword.  Mozilla supports all three
natively, so incorporating Mozilla as a control would be a good move, IMO.  
Shortly, I'm going to begin some more serious work at doing this for
BibleCS because I would like to see us be able to use Graphite for
rendering (at least of Bibles) in the near term.  (Another task for my
3-week vacation from school, I guess.)

--Chris