Qt port - baby steps

[Dirk Hohndel]

"Lubomir I. Ivanov" <neolit123 at gmail.com> writes:

> On 7 April 2013 06:56, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>>
>> I figured I'd start with divelist.c as this was (and in some ways still
>> is) the biggest mess. I'll tackle profile.c next as I think divelist and
>> profile are the first two things we need to get to work in order to get
>> something useful in the Qt branch.
>
> i was wondering if we are going to switch away from cairo/pango as well?
> apparently there is support for drawing on Qt surfaces on newer
> versions using cairo_qt_surface_create() (can't find documentation for
> it), but i think this new version seem to be missing on gnome's
> official FTP for win32 binareis and the latest dev package:
> cairo-dev_1.10.2-2_win32.zip. i can't seem to find a declaration of
> cairo_qt_surface_create() in the headers. also i have no idea if it's
> even needed for this to work.

Qt support has been in Cairo since 2010 so I don't quite understand why
it's not in the Win32 packages. 
The git log seems to show that these changes predate 1.10.2...

> Qt provides vector drawing support using the QPainter class, text
> layout using QTextLayout and also printing support using QPrinter, but
> this would mean we need to do a lot of work in print.c and profile.c.
> perhaps there is no need to switch away from cairo and pango for
> profiling and printing, but does anyone have experience with this and
> would it work? :(

I'll admit that I find the printer support in Gtk pretty frustrating and
was hoping to get something better with Qt - but that I haven't looked
into the details at all.

As to cairo vs. QPainter... through my job I have had the pleasure to
sit through many heated discussions on this topic. My silly believe is
that it will likely be easier to just stay consistent and use the Qt way
of doing things (and the Qt-fanboy faction around me is telling me that
anything you can do in cairo you can do better in Qt - I'll believe that
when I see it). But I'm open minded. I was hoping that Tomaz, Alberto,
Thiago and others will help us and guide us during the transition.

But first we need a skeleton up and running so that people can start
filling in the pieces.

/D