Subject: Re: Qt port - baby steps

[Dirk Hohndel]

Amit Chaudhuri <amit.k.chaudhuri at gmail.com> writes:

>> 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?
>
> I'll defer to Thiago on best practise, but I had a bash at Qt versions of
> the treeview and profile drawing a few days ago.
>
> https://github.com/amitkc/diveprofile
> https://github.com/amitkc/qss-divelist
>
> Both should compile (divelist was developed on Linux; diveprofile on OS X)
> and perform a limited set of the required functions.  They are based on
> examples taken from Qt texts written by ex-Trolls, so hopefully the
> starting point is sensible (possibly not optimal).

These are standalone apps so I pulled them and looked at them.

Quick correction to the README in qss-divelist - at www.hohndel.org you
will find my more or less abandoned blog but not Subsurface :-)

I think these are interesting unit experiments and hopefully can be
useful for people to look at as they are working on the Qt port.
Thanks for that.

And they are in fact the two widgets that I suggest that we start with,
so hopefully we'll get some progress in that direction inside our
infrastructure. 

> At the very least they may help highlight gaps to direct attention to if we
> are to consider dumping cairo/pango.
>
> BTW - suggestion of continuing to use the latter to draw and then blit to
> screen is very interesting.

I would rather see a native port, first, and fall back to the hybrid
solution if that runs into roadblocks. I keep coming back to the same
rationale. The more we are just a "normal Qt app" the easier will it be
to run on all of the Qt platforms.

And as some of you may have seen in the Qt 5.1 alpha announcement -
those platforms will soon include iOS and Android. I would hate to spend
all the effort on this port and then still lock us into a small corner
where we need custom this and custom that in order to work. Where the
Win32 port suffers because we need libraries that aren't commonly
available (as appears to be the case for the Cairo/Qt integration), etc.

> The qwt project sources may be worth a look to see how they have done their
> support for technical charts.

Certainly.

/D