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Thanks for the reply Damon. I'm cc'ing the Inkscape development list, Bryce Harrington and Mental, two core developers working on this issue.

More below...

On Tue, 2007-01-30 at 16:07 +0000, Damon Chaplin wrote:

On Mon, 2007-01-29 at 15:37 -0800, Jon Phillips wrote:

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Hi, have you considered using Inkscape's canvas for your project (http://inkscape.org). We are trying to modularize our code more so that we can help other projects and get more contributors. Plus, we want the benefits of Cairo on our app.

I wanted to create a new cairo-based canvas widget for GTK+ so Inkscape's canvas wasn't really an option.

Do you have a list of features of your canvas somewhere?

Unfortunately not...plus, it is not modularized well-enough yet...hence we are seeking out if it could be of use to others, and to try and combine efforts on various parts of Inkscape.

Here's the list of GooCanvas Features:

o Optional model/view split. o Uses interfaces for items & views. o Basic items - rect/ellipse/polyline/text/image/group. o Path item, using SVG path specification strings. o Embedded GTK+ widgets. o Layers/stacking order with raise/lower functions. o Cascading styles - line width/style/dashes, colors, fill patterns. o Affine transformations for all items - rotations/scales/skews. o Event handling - button/motion events, "pointer-events" property like SVG. o Grabs - support for pointer & keyboard grabs. o Keyboard focus traversal. o Accessibility (item title & description properties and hierarchy stuff). o Printing (output to a given cairo_t). o Scrolling. o Zooming. o Item visibility setting - on/off/above zoom threshold. o Simple animation. o Scalable - support for thousands of items over a large canvas area. o Support for different units - pixels/points/inches/millimeters. o API docs. o GooCanvasTable for layout of items (though this isn't in cvs yet).

It is already pretty stable and mature (better than GnomeCanvas/FooCanvas). Though the API is likely to change a little bit more in future before stabilizing.

I'd be interested to hear what things are needed for apps like Inkscape that GooCanvas doesn't have.

Damon

This is quite impressive Damon. Bryce and Mental, what are your thoughts?

Regardless if a collaboration happens or not, it is great to connect and get to know each other. Perhaps you would be interested in the upcoming libre graphics meeting conference in may 2007: http://lgm.scribus.net (temp site).

Jon