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#1 Add support for vector graphics output
I am the maintainer of the Debian package of drawtiming.
Here is a feature request I received. You can see the
original request at <http://bugs.debian.org/307805>.
On Thursday 05 May 2005 10:13, Rob Sims wrote:
> I'd like a vector formatted graphic to allow for better
> printing and rendering on various media. The program
> will do eps, but the resulting file is still a bitmap. eps,
> svg, hpgl would be good.
I agree this would be pretty cool. Although not the
cleanest, I wonder if this could be done in an automated
way after the fact, with autotrace or something similar?
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I will have to think about this one. The project is pretty
much tied to the capabilities of ImageMagick right now.
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Just some more info that might be useful:
Looking at the ImageMagick documentation here, it looks like
ImageMagick can support output to vector formats like SVG & EPS. It
looks like you can already output to these formats with drawtiming (i.e.
drawtiming -o whatever.eps whatever.txt) ... but the file is still a bunch of
single "pixel" vectors, so essentially a bitmap.
Anyway, I'm not sure if you would have to use a different API to draw or
whatever, or if ImageMagick even internally supports vector formats
other than just converting bitmaps to them, but if ImageMagick
supported it.
But at least ImageMagick does have some kind of support for the
formats, at least...
Anyway, maybe that helps, maybe it doesn't. =)
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I agree! I'd love to see real vector graphics output. Using
bitmaps results in problems when printing the diagrams, it
also increases the size of documents using quite a bit.
Someone submitted a patch that implements a CairoMM based rendering backend on http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1749546&group_id=118983&atid=682744
As far as I can tell, EPS output is now vector-based.
PDF output still uses ImageMagick and produces bitmap images.
If you want to generate diagrams in PDF, it is better to output EPS and then convert the resulting file to PDF.