Dave; On Thu, Jan 13, 2000 at 06:31:51PM +0100, David Monniaux wrote: > I am currently reviewing plug-ins with "real users". Hooray for real users! > Some plug-ins apparently and annoyingly lack much needed > functionality. For instance, the PolarCoord plug-in insists on > rendering into the same image as source, with same dimensions. I think PolarCoord also has some fencepost errors. If you do a Polar->Rect, Rect->Polar transform repeatedly, you will find that the image starts to distort rather than simply blurring. > So, an obvious maneuver like render a ribbon of text (say 1400x300 > pixels) then use the polar transform to make it circular does not > work as expected, since it outputs a circle of diameter 300 pixels. Expanding the image to 1400x1400 first would fix that. However, I can imagine that you might want to wrap an 8000x100 image into a 1000x1000 circle, but expanding the image to 8000x8000 might be beyond your machine's resources. > It is not the only plug-in with that problem, MapObject also insists > on rendering into an image of the same size. Yes, many plug-ins are inflexible with respect to their rendering target. > Either > > 1. I have not found the "right way" to have these plug-ins render > images of the right size. It is then very much unlikely that normal > users will find a way to do this. There is no "right way" right now. > 2. The needed functionality is absent. I consider this to be a BUG > that needs to be fixed before 1.2 is out. It is a bug because we > feature some plug-ins that provide a functionality provided by > decent painting programs, yet this functionality lacks some > fundamental setting, contrary to the intuition of all users. I think may plug-ins suffer from this problem, but I doubt that they can all be fixed in any reasonable amount of time. Here's another example: 'plasma' stretches the plasma to the aspect ratio of your image for no apparent reason. Tom -- -- Tom Rathborne tomr@xxxxxxxxxxxx -- http://www.aceldama.com/~tomr/ -- "I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my life-style."
