[GRASS-dev] XDRIVER

[Martin Landa]

Hi,

2011/4/13  <roger at spinn.net>:
> I'm aware that XDRIVER is antiquated piece of software that the project does
> not intend to use for it's primary display or interactive tool.  I have two
> main questions (and maybe some to follow up):
> Does the project intend to retain XDRIVER in the distribution?
> Are there any plans to update or upgrade XDRIVER?

No, XDRIVER has been removed from trunk (GRASS 7) some months ago. In
other words GRASS 7 drops Xmonitors and all related d.* modules
(d.zoom, d.pan, etc).

> As a bit of background, I use a Tcl/TK GUI for GRASS that I have been
> developing incrementally since roughly 1997, so not only is the GUI fairly
> well-developed but I'm pretty accustomed to it and I intend to keep it.  The
> GUI uses XDRIVER as it's primary display and interactive tool and ps.map for
> high quality output.

You mean `d.m` I guess. In GRASS 7 TCL/TK GUI has been also dropped.
There is only new wxGUI available. There are no plans to recover
TCL/TK GUI development, AFAIK.

> I recently started developing a module that would let me interactively
> construct map annotations using points, lines, arrows, rectangles,
> polylines, polygons and text.  When I started constructing the text
> capability I found that R_get_text_box() produced grossly incorrect results.
> That compounded the problem with low quality of the screen fonts -- even
> using FreeType2.
> I remedied the problem by adding libXft to XDRIVER.  That gave me
> high-quality, antialiased, client-side fonts and replaced all of the
> font-handling and rendering capabilities currently in GRASS.  And it
> enormously simplified the code.  And R_get_text_box() produces the right
> result.
> Adding Xft changed the behavior of some text and font modules: label
> placement in d.vect is great, but d.font didn't work and d.paint.labels
> references labels incorrectly.  There are probably other changes that I'll
> find later.

I am not expert here, so I am leaving comments to others. Anyway,
display architecture in GRASS 7 is primary based on Cairo library. New
development goes in that direction.

Martin

-- 
Martin Landa <landa.martin gmail.com> * http://geo.fsv.cvut.cz/~landa