[SciPy-user] FW: anti-grain

[eric jones]

> 
>  From where I'm sitting, anti-grain sounds like a great bitmap backend
> rendering engine.  I would _strongly_ encourage you to keep vector 
> rendering in mind> though, if the goal of making production-quality 
> output is still something you're aiming for.  PDF is a great start,
but
> embedding PDF in documents is still a black art.  Long-term, SVG will 
> hopefully get broader support as a
> format that can be used for a variety of media, from printing presses
to
> cellphones =).

Right.  The Kiva API is DisplayPDF and therefore vector based.  That
won't change.  The PDF backend will definitely stay, and I would like to
see PS/EPS and SVG backends built (thanks for the PIL backend Dave).  I
have visions of compositing Kiva images with OpenGL 3D rendered images,
so the OpenGL backend might be a good one to keep around also.  But,
instead of making a full blown wx, tkInter, Qt, gtk, PIL, etc. backend
for rendering to the screen (bitmap) that is based on the drawing
commands of the individual toolkits, it would be much easier to write
one anti-grain renderer to a Numeric array or maybe some special image
structure. Building a new Kiva backend is then as simple as learning how
to blit this thing into the screen for a new toolkit.  The GUI
interaction portion of Chaco might be significantly refactored when we
go down this road also to make porting that part of Chaco much easier
also.  It may not even be any better to keep a OpenGL version around
since we can blit anti-grain images into it just as easily as other
APIs.  I guess this decision will depend on speed.

The only potential downside that I see is if anti-grain is slower at
drawing than the GUI toolkits.  Anti-grain looked plenty fast to me in
the demos I have looked at -- it looked just as fast as GDI+ (windows
new path based rendering API), but we'll just have to wait and see on
this one.  

regards,
eric