Re: [boost] Re: thoughts on a GUI component library

From: Dave Harris (brangdon_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-12-23 17:25:26

In-Reply-To: <cqcjii$hs0$1_at_[hidden]>
dave_at_[hidden] (David Abrahams) wrote (abridged):
> That's okay for simple things, but for any serious printing work you
> need to know you're talking to a printer.  For example, you may need to
> embed postscript in your output stream.

Not all printers support postscript, so you'd need to know not just that 
you were printing, but what kind of printer it was. Although there 
probably needs to be some kind of abstraction-busting pass-through 
mechanism, I see it as the exception rather than the rule.

Another issue is transparency. My employer's drawing framework supports 
semi-transparency in the form of an alpha channel. This is used by us for 
things like anti-aliasing, and by users for subtle colour blends. Some 
printers can support transparency directly and some cannot. We found we 
needed a relatively elaborate architecture to hide that detail from 
application drawing code.

I'm a bit concerned about the scope of this boost project. Our drawing 
framework is pretty huge.

-- Dave Harris, Nottingham, UK