On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 05:36 +0200, Chris Lilley wrote:
M> by way of contrast, the boolean M> operations required by SVG vector effects represent a _much_ higher M> implementation burden than triangulation would.
Although Inkscape still seems to implement most of them, while calculating the resulting geometry itself rather than writing out the vector effect. but that should be a separate thread.
The thing is, the code we brought in to implement that is pretty problematic -- the author vanished on us, the licensing status is a little fuzzy, and the code quality is so poor as to be nearly unmaintainable. I couldn't recommend that anyone else use it, and the only reason we haven't replaced it ourselves is that there simply aren't any other computational geometry libraries with the required features (and numerical stability!) available under a liberal enough license. Unfortunately writing a robust implementation of those operations requires a great deal of very specialized domain knowledge.
Until we see other open source implementations of vector effects (and until there's a finalized standard, which realistically probably depends on that), I don't think I can sell implementing vector effects to the other developers. We've discussed approaches using <switch> to deal with user agents that don't implement them, but the consensus was that such approaches would introduce too much complexity to the UI code for working with paths.
-mental