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List:       lenya-dev
Subject:    Re: Saying hi, SVG image editor, Mozile
From:       Andreas Hartmann <andreas () apache ! org>
Date:       2006-12-19 13:08:52
Message-ID: em8o94$vge$1 () sea ! gmane ! org
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Hi Dag Sverre,

Dag Sverre Seljebotn schrieb:
> Hi! I'm rather new to Lenya (played with it for two days) and I must say
> it looks excellent (very much in principle, perhaps less when it comes
> to stableness but that's how it is...).

which version did you try? I guess 1.4 according to the last paragraph.


> What I'm missing, and planning to provide myself, is good WYSIWYG
> image/photo support (Mozilla only). My primary goal will of course be
> getting the site I am working on up but I'll gladly contribute/integrate
> it with Lenya at some point, if people want it and and if I manage to
> pull it off.

That sounds very interesting.


> I already have the image editor itself (from the shattered pieces of the
> CMS I'm now running away from). Basically it works around wrapping an
> uploaded photo in some SVG, and modifying that SVG to provide crop and
> rotation.

This is the same way like it is done in Lenya (we provide scaling ATM).


> Now the editor itself isn't the main point (just use GIMP etc.), however
> even with external editing there are improvments that can be done:
> - Moving images around in the current editors integrated in Lenya
> doesn't work very well.

Agreed, but that's somewhat dependent on the restrictions of the
underlying XML format. I guess the main challenge would be to provide
a generic image manipulation/positioning interface and a mapping
(or hook) to support (virtually) arbitrary XML representations of
the image attributes.


> - Uploading fixed images is by nature resolution-dependant etc. Ideally,
> I think one could aim for uploading something at a high resolution, and
> use SVG to shrink it to fit naturally in the current page, perhaps
> depending on "target page width".

This is already supported in Lenya 1.4-dev.


> What I'm thinking might be my approach follows. I might be a bit
> far-fetched as my first Lenya-related project but I'd like to scetch it
> out and perhaps recieve comments on it.
> 
> 1) Have a look at integrating Mozile first, since it seems more active
> and cleaner than BXE at the moment, and version 0.8 does everything BXE
> does from what I can tell (ie, BXE merely adds a layer to earlier
> versions of Mozile that in 0.8 is featured in Mozile itself). This is
> probably valuable work in itself?

Actually I don't know Mozile well enough to judge this, but a
better availability of stable and easy-to-use editors is certainly
cruical for the acceptance of Lenya.


> 2) Introduce SVG markup in documents than want to use the editor (add
> the needed SVG subset to XHTML types etc). Photos used by the SVG must
> be added as assets as now, but the SVG itself stays in the document.

That's an interesting approach, though I have the feeling that it
would not support the orthogonality between the asset and the including
document. IMO the includable SVG representation is a (parameterized)
format of the image's resource type. OTOH, having the SVG in the
document would allow virtually any presentation options, and
paramerizing the format would certainly increase the complexity.


> (Though I suppose an SVG sub-asset with linking is also possible). (In
> effect, SVG will simply act as a more powerful <img> tag - in addition
> to width/height there's rotation, cropping etc.).

Yes, and additionally it would allow overlays with vector- and other
bitmap-based image fragments (e.g. add an indicating arrow to a bitmap).


> 3) Introduce transforms to turn one xhtml+svg doc into one xhtml+<img>
> and several JPGs.

Yes, I once suggested this approach in an OSCOM talk. Additionally,
you can generate a PDF including the images from the same source
document.


> 4) Add an image editor to the Mozile or BXE page editors. When editing
> the page, the SVG should pass through to Mozilla and be modified as part
> of the DOM. Image handling is very badly supported in either of these,
> but the great thing about Mozile is that it modifies the DOM directly
> and very cleanly, so I can introduce another editor handling the images
> alongside it and they will cooperate (almost without knowing about each
> other). (The main image editor will be in a sub-popup window like in BXE
> today, but moving and dragging the image around is also important).

I'm very interested in seeing a prototype of this. Unfortunately I'm
not yet familiar enough with the client-side editing aspects to
comment on this approach, but it sounds promising.


> My questions, then:
> - Anything been done about 1) already? Why/why not?
> - General comments welcome.
> - If there's anyone beyond myself that's interested in this plan (or
> parts of it, like 1)) then it would be great to have somebody to ask
> stupid questions along the way (mostly "in what file would I find..."
> and other Lenya-related stuff - I have experience with
> Cocoon/XSLT/JavaScript etc) that would be great. (Also, how open is this
> mailing list and the IRC channel in general to "stupid questions"? I can
> always figure things out if I use an hour, but that's one hour less
> spent doing actual work).

I'm very interested in the parts 2) and 3) and will help as good
as I can :)

> - I'd want to work against 1.4. However the version in the SVN trunk
> seems to break on a daily basis.

Yes, but I'd recommend to use this version anyway. I'd suggest to have
two local working copies, so you can use one to test if it's worth
or dangerous to update.

> Is there a "more stable" version I can
> use (and stick to) without going all the way back to 1.2?

No, I don't think there is a more stable version of 1.4.

> Whatever I
> manage to do probably shouldn't be part of 1.4 anyway so...

That's no problem - it will go completely into a module which might or
might not be released with 1.4 depending on its stability. We could
add it to the SVG module, but since this module is not crucial we
could postpone its release if it is too risky for 1.4.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts!

-- Andreas


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