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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    kiconedit & kpaint commits
From:       John Califf <jcaliff () compuzone ! net>
Date:       2000-11-15 12:49:56
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I have just committed fixes and enhancements to both kiconedit and
kpaint which should allow both these apps to be moved back into
kdegraphics and out of kdenonbeta for the next release of kde 2.  Many
thanks to the authors of these apps which are very useful and greatly
missed.  This work was prompted by a gripe from a user about missing
kiconedit in Kde 2.0, and my own feeling that they just needed minor
fixes to work properly with Kde 2.

Assessment and changes made:

Kiconedit:  

The "meat" of this app was in great shape - the actual icon editing
tools and image code.  I changed none of that.  However, the file io for
both loading and saving was a complete mess, causing numerous crashes
and filename corruption. Debugging code and backup/tempfile logic caused
more crashes.  All that should now be fixed.  Further, you can now load
and save any kind of image file supported by Qt.  As it was, you could
only save in xpm format and couldn't load pngs.

Drag and drop is not functional, but is not essential to this app.  The
fact that drag and drop is not function is a bogus reason for keeping
this excellent and much needed app out of kdegraphics.  Drag and drop
can be added later.   The image code in Kiconedit is outstanding, and
I'm glad I worked on it because it provides examples of how to do tools
from scratch for kimageshop without using Qt pixmap based code which
won't work with low level processing.

KPaint

There were some problems with loading and saving files here as well. 
These should now be fixed.  You can now load local files as args from
the command line using either relative of absolute path names - couldn't
load anything from cmd line before.  Also a few other bugfixes for crash
situations.

A bigger change to kpaint was finishing up the cut/copy/paste code which
the original authors started.  You can now cut/copy and paste.  It's
neat. When pasting, you can move the image around after clicking and
holding down the left button.  When released, the selection will be set
into place exactly where you want it.  Actually it shows a kind of
shadow, should show the full image but I can't remember the ROPs for
that, which I once used in an Os2 paint app but will have to study
raster operations more to make it just right.  It works fine now,
though, and I can prettify it later.  This uses a local clipboard,
merely implementing what was there but unfinished.  It should use the
kdeapp global clipboard before converting to a local QPixmap for blit
operations used in pasting. However, again, now that the crashes (all of
them I could find) are fixed, there is no valid reason for keeping this
app out of kdegraphics.  During the next few weeks I can easily add the
enhancements.

With kpaint, you can open multiple main windows in the same process,
sort of strange, but this has many possibilities with a global
clipboard.  It is even possible to implement layers if you start with
pngs with alpha channels treating each window as a layer, cutting and
pasting between them into the one you want to save to.  That can be
implemented later. As is, kpaint is a very nice for simple, and even
some fairly sophisticated, image editing if you don't need layers. 
Let's use it.

SUMMARY:

Please, let's move these apps back into the main event and put political
differences aside.  These apps are much needed, and take nothing away
from more ambitious projects like Pixie and KImageshop, which have
different uses anyway.  Please compile these from cvs or the snapshots
and test. My fixes and changes are in cvs now, but won't show up in the
snapshots for another day.

If you find bugs I've missed, feel free to fix them or ask me to. 
However, please don't make changes withouut testing your changes and
don't make changes which break something that works just to make these
apps conform to some "standard" without making sure that the changes are
an improvement. One would think that this need not be said, but some
changes have not observed this simple maxim and I had to undo them.
These apps are now fully compatible with Kde 2 and Qt 2.21 as is, even
if they don't use xmlgui and some other new stuff.  So what.  

Again, thanks to the original authors.  I have added my name to the list
of authors of kpaint but not to kiconedit because I didn't make any
changes to the heart of kiconedit.

John
 
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