pre rfc draft on rendering

[Steve Lime]

Personally I'm all for this type of consolidation. The current setup is indeed hard to deal with.

Some questions/comments:

 - with simple line layers you mention the problem of intersections w/outlines. Do you have an idea beyond the current caching method for producing nice intersections? I can't tell from what is written.
 - with brushed lines, I'm that brushed-based (as opposed to marker-based) lines could be done away with. The really nice AGG example you have isn't really brushing is it? It seems conceptually more like markers with a gap of 0.

 - with labeling, follow: the labelPathObj hools positions and angles already. 

 - I notice you're passing most of the components of a styleObj in most cases, why not just a reference to a styleObj?

 - what if, if any, changes to MapScript to you see? It didn't seem obvious to me that any would be necessary as all this new plumbing could be effectively hidden from the highest level draw calls.

 - the GD render does support a simple pixmap cache for vector/ellipse symbols. That should be extended, merged or done away with in favor of a common image cache.  

 - is this the time to address color? Do we stick with RGB and HEX representations for colors with opacity as a separate keyword?

Steve

>>> On 11/9/2007 at 6:44 AM, in message
<d2b988930711090444sb4413e7t80ae48e6394adc47 at mail.gmail.com>, thomas bonfort
<thomas.bonfort at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> hi all,
> I'm currently looking at cleaning up / avoiding code duplication /
> easier additions / etc... for the rendering side of mapserver. I've
> put up some working notes at
> http://trac.osgeo.org/mapserver/wiki/UnifyingTheRenderingInterfaces 
> and would like to hear your comments/suggestions/flaming/etc...
> 
> thomas