[GRASS-dev] XDRIVER

[roger at spinn.net]

FWIW, my GUI is not gis.m, nor is it related in any way to any other GRASS 
GUIs, current or historical.  It is an original product.  As you might 
guess, explaining the need for and the development of a separate GUI could 
become a long story. 

How long will the project continue to support 6.* versions? 


Roger 


Martin Landa writes: 

> 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
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