On Fri, 7 Nov 2003, herve couvelard wrote:

hello,

I was using sodipodi for svg and gis. for what i understood, it seems that the forked inkscape will, in the future match more my goals.

I would like to help with some gis stuffs : area of path (closed ones), area of intersection of path. intersection of path (with beziers curves) scales and so more....

I am not a C developper, but i started to learn a little as wome of my code will merge in a php extension (work one use twice.)

Cool. Hopefully we can help make this a good place for learning good development skills.

will inkscape turn into C++ ? (i didn't understand all of the thing ?)

Yes, it has been successfully ported to C++ now. Currently it doesn't use any C++-only features, so it actually can be compiled either with gcc or g++. This won't last long, though, as we will begin using C++ features like classes, namespaces, and STL in the near future.

i think i understood it would use a plug-in mechanism to 'merge' functionnalities in the soft, that would be a nice feature. how could that change the way of coding ?

This is a goal for a little bit further along in the future. We need people to start experimenting with some ideas and prototypes for how we might do this, to help work out some of the design concepts. We should expect to hold some discussions on this list in the coming weeks about this.

The way we want this to change coding is that by being able to implement features in modular form, different developers can take responsibility and ownership of these and be able to develop them under their own direction without needing to coordinate directly with all the other developers. This gives them freedom to make their own decisions about things and freely try out ideas that the rest of us might disagree with, without breaking anything critical.

We want the system to support "language binding" by providing a set of low-level functions into the Inkscape internals. If someone wants to have the ability to make modules in some given programming language, they would be able to create bindings to these functions in their desired language. This then would make it possible for users and other developers to extend Inkscape in that language.

The devil is in the details, though, and we don't know how to implement this yet. So this is why we need to encourage people to do some experimenting and come up with some good ideas.

I know that my last question might be really 'over-over-not-cool', but it would be very helpfull for me to start if someone could tell me (or point me somewhere) in few lines : how create a toolbox.

See toolbox.c

how to affects action to a drawn-objet: ex running a script that change the color of a path

Hmm... maybe path-chemistry.c?

how to collect action to a drawn object : ex where is the code that complete the position_toolbox.

sp-item-transform.c has the functions for scaling, rotating, moving, etc.

Also note that it often helps to use 'grep' on the name of routines to find where they're called and/or defined, and you can navigate through the code without too much difficulty.

i understand that is a newb-dummy question, but the name of the function with its source files would be sufficient. i am used to php so i 'understand' a little c code, and i would gain really time and effort.

Herve

Good luck!

Bryce