Re: [Plplot-devel] A Qt4-based device driver has just been donated to PLplot

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2009-03-06 10:14-0000 Alban Rochel wrote:

> Hi Werner,
>
> Werner Smekal wrote:
>> Hi Alban,
>>
>>> "Another issue I have noticed for the Qt devices is they all seem to
>>> use the
>>> Hershey fonts. Do you have any present plans to use the powerful Qt font
>>> and text layout facilities (e.g. for Complex text layout languages like
>>> Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Thai, etc.) to render text?"
>>> No, we don't, simply because the required effort was not worth it in
>>> QSAS. They don't look that bad on the Qt driver as it does antialiasing.
>>>  Maybe in a future development, but we have many other priorities on
>>> QSAS!
>>
>> This is actually quite "easy". Looking at the psttf and cairo code I
>> wrote some abstracted functions, since I actually use 3 different
>> backends for the wxWidgets driver, all with it's own font handling code.
>> It's more or less including one function and providing another function
>> which does the actual "font rendering". I can add part of this code to
>> the qt driver and write some comments where code is then missing, which
>> is then to be filled out by you. As long qt knows unicode (100% sure)
>> and knows how to rotate and shear fonts (quite sure) this should be one
>> hour of work (and a day of debugging ;). If you don't object I'll try that.
>
> Well, if you have the courage to do that, I have no objection of course
> and I will try to complete your work. Thanks! Feel free to contact me if
> anything is unclear in my code.

This sounds like an excellent plan to obtain this much-desired functionality
for the qt device driver.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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