On 30-6-2013 14:44, Alex Valavanis wrote:
Hi Matthew (+ devs),
I'm afraid I haven't been following the discussion of your project in any detail because I'm super busy at the moment, but it certainly sounds like valuable work.
I just wanted to check that you've had a thorough look into external library support for unit handling... I spotted a few nice libraries a while ago when I was looking into options for physics simulation stuff but never actually made use of them yet. One possible option is the Boost Units library [1], which provides support for unit conversion etc. Since Boost is very widely available, it may be worth looking into this as an option?
Apologies if this has already been discussed or is irrelevant to the discussion... as I say, I haven't really been paying too much attention recently!
Best wishes,
Alex
[1] http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_53_0/doc/html/boost_units/Quick_Start.html
Thanks for the pointer, I was not aware of this package, but we did not look for it either. Inkscape only needs "length" units (so far at least), so to me it feels much better to just handle that ourselves to keep the code/dependencies small. Most of the actual unit calculation code is already in Inkscape anyway. The GSoC project is to unify the unit handling, and to then improve the code to actually use user-specified units (instead of assuming "px" for example).
Cheers, Johan