Re: [XBoard-devel] chess fonts

[Richard Hoelscher]

Jason Dorje Short said:
>>>Finally I'd suggest that if possible xboard/winboard should also load
>>>and render the SVG files directly at runtime.  My program uses GTK and
>>>GDK, so loading SVG is trivial using librsvg.  Using XAW I have no idea
>>>what, if any, library xboard could use for this.
...
> For rendering SVG in X11 Cairo looks like the only solution, but I don't
> think it is mature enough yet to add as a hard requirement.  Another
> alternative, of course, is "upgrading" xboard to use GTK.

Jason: Note that Cairo is more of a vector-based graphics output library
than anything... think different output on different types of media, and
eventually a way for toolkits to free themselves from the tyranny of the
pixel. As Cairo nears maturity, there are plans for librsvg to support a
Cairo backend in addition to (or possibly replacing) the libart option.
That said, present-day, there's nothing wrong or improper about using a
SVG library that renders to raster images for use in a computer game.

To support SVG, any library xboard could choose would also have other
dependencies... In librsvg, at a minimum, this would be libart and
libxml2. It's unlikely any SVG library wouldn't rely on at least one XML
library.

<plug> Since you are using Gtk+ in your app, I recommend checking out
games-preimage, part of libgames-support in that I added to CVS
gnome-games a few weeks ago. It's provides a relatively low-hassle way of
loading and scaling both SVG and PNG, and it's being now used in gnome
solitaire and a few other games... You should be able to copy it into your
app and remove the Gnome-VFS part easily. It requires CVS librsvg and a
recent gtk+-2.5 </plug>

> SVG files can easily be hand-tuned in this way.  Inkscape (or Sodipodi)
> makes an excellent editor for improving the images.

I can't agree with your assessment of those two packages, sorry...
Semi-professional artist. ;)

-Richard Hoelscher
http://www.rahga.com/svg/