Flake
Yesterday, Rob, Casper, Thorsten, Peter and I discussed the architecture and the design of our new shared KOffice-wide graphical object library. When taking a short breather, strolling through the snow we decided to provisionally call this library flake -- after the complex shaped that were filling the night sky.
The goals of this library are to have in all KOffice application that can use graphical objects like clip-art, stencils, borders, animations, embedded movies and whatever:
- Common object handling in all libraries: the same user interface for creation, selection, moving, resizing, snapping to rulers and guides etc.
- A simple object hierarchy with a common manipulatable base object class and subclasses for svg objects, lines, movies, embedded documents and text objects. Svg objects and lines should always have the option of an associated text object.
- Color management (may be hard to achieve with Arthur)
- Connectors and snapping
- Excellent printing
- The possibility of adding high-level behavior to objects (click on an object and move to another page in Kivio.
- Copy and paste and drag and drop in and between applications
- Saveable in OASIS
- Inspector widgets
- Undo and redo (of course)
- The objects render themselves to a QPainter
- Oh, and while we're at it, let's try to get a common ruler implementation, shall we?
What we don't want to do is:
- KOffice independent. Initially it will be, because we're developing on Qt4, but it's no hard requirement, unless people from outside KOffice start helping and hacking, perhaps.
- No canvas. This is no canvas library: every application will have a canvas optimized for the kind of things it needs to do (although Karbon14 and Kivio will merge their canvas and use the same thing.)
- Creation of complex svg itself: use Karbon14 or Inkscape for that
- Save in KOffice's old file format
Of course, we immediately started hacking, and we can already put a red square with a black border on screen and manipulate it! Our first bit of Qt4 code. Impressive isn't it?
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