On 12/10/05, Edward Flick <eddy@...690...> wrote:
Hello everybody, I haven't said anything in a while, and I have a quick question. I was looking into implementing SVG Filters several months ago, when you guys said I might want to wait until Inkscape got Cairoized. Well, so I fell out of touch for a while, and now I'm just wondering where Inkscape's Cairoification is at. I love inkscape and one of the only shortcomings that I continously run into is the inability to create real soft drop shadows, halos, embosses, and other raster effects. So are we almost cairoized, or do we already have plans for imlementing SVG filters?
Cairoization has seen no progress so far, in part because cairo turned out to be very slow, even slower than we are at the moment. Also we all wait for Xara renderer sources to open, with the hope to borrow some of it to Inkscape and/or to Cairo.
I completely sympathize with your plea for blurring. I'm in desperate need for it too. Moreover I think that the gaussian blur filter will be THE most important feature added to Inkscape during its existence. It will at once trancend the limits of a "vector editor".
I even looked into the possibility of enabling blurring in our renderer. This seems doable. I didn't move on with that, in part because of the unclear prospects of our renderer and whether it will be replaced by anything.
However apart from renderer, filter support needs a lot of new code at the SVG level. And this is what we can start doing now, it won't be lost in any case. We'll need to add an SPFilter object and make it implement the SVG specification for the svg:filter element, and we also need CSS support for specifying filters. This is all pretty straightforward - a lot of the logic can be borrowed from SPGradient which has a similar mode of operation.
I hereby call for volunteers for the SPFilter task. You won't see immediate result from this yet, but it's a good task for novices who want to learn a large and important part of the codebase. (For one thing, you are unlikely to break anything by adding it :) If and when the SVG/CSS support is ready, I will probably be tempted to add a quick and dirty blur support to the renderer, no matter whether it's going to be replaced later or not.
So - any takers?
-- bulia byak Inkscape. Draw Freely. http://www.inkscape.org