i spent some time today going through each application in kdegraphics, and a couple that aren't right now, to update the status of them. the deadlines for getting the applications arranged in modules is looming, at least for apps moving in.
i'm going to be trying something a little different with kdegraphics in kde4: moving all the niche applications to extragear and keeping a set for essential functionality in kdegraphics. extragear is doing the big kde3/kde4 shakeout on friday, and after that i'll be moving apps into extragear/graphics. then with the release of kde 4.0, and each subsequent release, there'll be two graphics app packages (not counting the apps in koffice =): kdegraphics and extragear-graphics.
the last stable tag in svn for each app in extragear-graphics will ship in the the extragear package. the apps in extragear/graphics will still be encouraged to do their own releases as well; that doesn't change.
there are a few apps and pieces in kdegraphics that just simply won't be making the transition to kde4. this could because there are more sensible options now or the apps hasn't been ported, or perhaps just needs a rewrite plain and simple.
one app i'd like to see in that category is kfax. currently i can't really remove it completely for one reason and one reason only: neither okularn or ligature can load files that contain raw g3 data (mimetype: image/fax-g3). basically these files are tiff image data but without tags (the "t" in tiff =). so libtiff can read and write the data, it just can't open the files directly without some manipulation.
there is an app called raw2tiff that comes with libtiff, however. you can download the source for libtiff here and check out the 640 line file that is raw2tiff in tools/raw2tiff.c. it's pretty straightforward stuff, mostly just making an educated "best guess" as to the contents of the file.
another example of raw loading can be seen in kfax itself, though it's a bit more complicated as it does more than simply figure out the metadata.
if okular got support for loading raw g3 data then we could put kfax out to pasture. it's not actively worked on and it would be nice to offer all the possibilities that okular provides to faxes.
if you're looking for a cool little project that probably won't take too much time or effort, take a look at kdegraphics/okular/generators/tiff/ and raw2tiff.c in libtiff's source distribution and see if you can't bridge this gap. =)
as for me, i need to finish eating lunch (typing whilst i eat here) and then get to some plasma hacking.
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3 comments:
Hmm. If it's a question of supporting a bitmap format, then to my way of thinking, neither Okular or KFax should do it -- that should be a plugin, which enhances the core image-loading/saving support that ANY app can use. For isntances, think wallpapers, krita, games, widget backgrounds, icons, along with the Okular/fax-app uses.
Amigas did this back in '95 or so, with generic image and audio file support, amongst other things (generic compression support was available in a third party library, for instance). It would be nice to take the best of the past with us, as we move forward, no?
Little addition to what Aaron kindly said: take a look also at tools/fax2tiff.c in the libtiff sources.
If it's a task still up for grabs after my exams, I might have a go.
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