Re: [Rdkit-devel] Chem/Draw code: new feature and some refactoring

[<gi...@gm...>]

On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 5:21 AM, Greg Landrum <gre...@gm...> wrote:
> Cairo is a great toolkit for drawing, and the backend you did is
> perfectly capable. For systems that have cairo installed, it's almost
> definitely the best choice to use. However, due to its dependency on
> GTK Cairo is not easy to build and install.

I think this is not accurate, it's GTK that requires cairo, cairo
itself has very few dependencies. There are also more or less
"official" cairo builds for windows referenced from
http://cairographics.org/download, in case one do not want to mess
with compilers.


> the aggdraw canvas provides a high-quality alternative for
> generating raster images. The sping-based canvas is provided as a
> lowest-common denominator, pure-python, solution to allow images to be
> generated from the RDKit out-of-the-box (it also has the advantage of
> being able to generate pdf and svg, which aggdraw cannot).

I have nothing against keeping the various backends; I'm more in favor
of removing the rdkit/sping directory, which looks like an external
dependency much like agg, cairo or other stuff not bundled with the
rdkit tarball. On a side note, I had a brief look at the code and at
first glance there is not much there added over PIL so if you want to
provide a simple fallback when no other backend is available I'd
suggest replacing sping for a plain PIL backend.

Obviously, those are just my 0.02 :)

Cheers

G.

-- 
Gianluca Sforna

http://morefedora.blogspot.com
http://identi.ca/giallu - http://twitter.com/giallu