Qt port - baby steps

[Dirk Hohndel]

Thiago Macieira <thiago at macieira.org> writes:

> On domingo, 7 de abril de 2013 09.07.08, Dirk Hohndel wrote:
>> 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.
>
> I have no idea about the cairo integration and I'm not such a zealot to say 
> that Qt does everything better. In fact, I know a lot of time was spent on 
> making cairo really good, so I wouldn't be surprised if is more efficient in 
> many use-cases.

I wasn't thinking of you when I talked about Qt-fanboys... but as a
matter of fact, you were in a couple of those meetings that I am talking
about... usually acting as the voice of reason between the Gtk/cairo
fanboys and Qt fanboys... :-)

> That said, we go back to the Cairo-Qt integration. I do not know it and, quite 
> frankly, I have no reports of anyone using it (no one has asked any questions 
> about it in the 7+ years I've been on the Qt interest mailing list). So my 
> first reaction is that using the integration is a bad idea...

Yikes. If no one is using it we are in a spot I do not want to be
in. The only user of a barely maintained piece of code, gluing together
Qt and Gtk infrastructure? No thank you.

> Yes, I recommend sticking to all Qt whenever possible. Another advantage will 
> be to remove the need to deploy Cairo and Pango on Windows.
>
> In the porting process, we may attempt to use the integration and see how well 
> that works. If it doesn't, we can always paint in cairo to an image/raster 
> backend and then blit those pixels to the screen. At the very least, it allows 
> us to port in steps.

That may be a way of doing this. The profile drawing is certainly one of
our most treasured parts of this application. Linus and I have spent a
huge amount of time getting it to where it is today.

Can you point us to a concise primer on how to do scaled anti-aliased
rendering of vectors and fonts into a window using Qt techniques?

Thanks

/D