---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Subject: Re: OpenOffice file format improvements
Date: Monday 09 June 2003 20:20
From: rwlbuis@xs4all.nl
To: "David Faure" <faure@kde.org>
Hi,
> we discussed your suggestions at today's phone conference.
Ok. Nice to hear they are being considered.
> * Gradients stop: accepted on principle, concrete proposal to be posted
> this week.
Nice. I really think the original svg spec on this makes much sense.
I cant think of much more to add to it. Though adobe seems to have
added yet another concept, the midpoint. Its for intra color ramp
adjustments, so if you go from yellow-to-red, 0.5 maps the midcolor in
the middle, 0.1 means the midcolor lies close to the yellow, so most of
the gradient will be red, 0.9 lies close to the red, so most of the
gradient will be yellow.
Ofcourse playing with an app that offers this such as adobe illustrator or
karbon14 will make it very clear very soon. Also this concept is well
documented.
Ofcourse its not up to me to decide how nice this is, I am just telling
the possibilities atm :)
> * Layer attributes (locked/unlocked, visible/invisible): same thing
Nice. I think this is useful as well. Maybe even more attributes can be
thought up, this would require some study on vector apps with layers.
> * Multiple strokes per shape: I need your help on that one.
> Can SVG do it? What's the XML representation for it?
Alas, not officially :|
> Can you suggest the precise improvement to the OO file format that would
> allow to do that?
I can only think of a few "emulations".
If you want to do it right, you'd have to make strokes and fills tags
themselves.
Something like :
<stroke id="mystroke">
<item color="red" width="4.0" />
<item color="yellow" width="2.0" dasharray="5 5 6 6" />
</stroke>
An alternative is in the attrs, which quickly gets messy :
<path stroke="red;yellow" stroke-width="1.0;5.0" />
Possibly the old behaviour of simple 1 stroke/1 fill could be kept as well
as default.
Downside to this is I am not aware if this is considered in w3c circles.
So it seems likely svg is not quite ready to do it per the standard.
I'll try to keep thinking of a way this week though...
> * Clipping groups and regions. I think I understand what this means, but
> does this
> imply that the current file format can only do clipping to single
> rectangles?
> This is about clipping to a set of rectangles, like a QRegion? Or?
> They also asked what this clipping applies to - is this about clipping a
> single
> shape? A group of shapes? The whole page? (I guess not :)).
Only rects would be limiting I think. Svg allows cliparts to reference
arbitrary paths to clip to. So you could think of using text (as path)
for clipping to. If you imagine some image, clipped by text, that is quite
powerful. I dont know if OO offers an alternative to this though, and
whether it falls inside the scope for OO Draw (it falls in the scope for
Illustrator and I think karbon14 as well).
As you see its also represented in ps, and I think also pdf, its really
worth considering IMHO.
> I guess the best would be to suggest a precise improvement to the OO
> format here as well.
ATM it looks like svg provides a nice lead for this.
> When talking about gradients we looked at the SVG spec, and it includes
> intensity (from the HSV model, as I understand it?) and opacity (this
> means
> transparency, right?). We wondered whether transparency (to a background
> image)
> was something that we wanted office applications to support... Same thing
> for intensity...
I dont know about intensity. Opacity/transparency is one of the strong
points of svg and pdf I think.
> E.g. office applications are meant for printing, which uses the CMYK color
> model, so anything that uses very intensively the HSV model can have some
> trouble getting the exact colors to print.
I am no expert on printing, but pdf supports it, so maybe its worth
investigating how pdf, transparency and printing work together.
Also the actual svg specs on printing may deal with just that, but I
havent read that part yet.
Cheers,
Rob.
-------------------------------------------------------
--
David FAURE, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).
Qtella users - stability patches at http://blackie.dk/~dfaure/qtella.html