From: Matt Gushee <mgushee@havenrock.com> To: caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Subject: [Caml-list] Graphics frustration Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 22:20:04 -0600 Message-ID: <20030724042004.GH441@swordfish> (raw) Hello, all-- I have been working on an application which will generate on-the-fly graphics for the Web, but I have become very frustrated by the limitations of the available graphics libraries for OCaml. If anyone reading this thinks there are solutions I have overlooked, I would be happy to discuss details. Right now, though, my purpose is to find out whether others share my concerns, and how much interest there is in developing better graphics libraries. What I would like to see is a single library with at least the following capabilities: * drawing primitives: line, rectangle, ellipse and/or arc, perhaps bezier curves * rendering text with arbitrary Type 1 and/or TrueType fonts * antialiasing * basic image manipulation functions such as transformations, contrast adjustment, cropping, etc. * saving to common bitmap formats such as JPEG and PNG * cross-platform taking the various graphics packages together, all these capabilities exist, but as far as I can tell there is no single package that combines them all. So, in developing my application, I started out with OCamlPlot, but discovered that it - doesn't do antialiasing - uses only 2 or 3 built-in fonts for PNG output - has a rather rigid and idiosyncratic API - doesn't run on Windows Then I decided to try MLgraph + Camlimages, which is an improvement, but still falls short: MLgraph is excellent for drawing, but saves only to PostScript--and I find the final result, converted to PNG with CamlImages, rather unsatisfactory (the main problem is that antialiasing doesn't work very well, which may actually be a Ghostscript issue). Performance with this combination is also markedly poorer than with OCamlPlot. Then there's OCamlGD, which seems quite promising. When complete, it will probably satisfy all my requirements; but there hasn't been a relesase in quite a while. So that's a quick summary of my situation. Do others agree with me that this is a significant problem? Are there any good solutions in the works? I am happy, by the way, to put some effort into developing something better. My contribution would be limited, though (I'm not a C programmer, for example, so I wouldn't be able to create a wrapper for an existing C library.). Comments? -- Matt Gushee When a nation follows the Way, Englewood, Colorado, USA Horses bear manure through mgushee@havenrock.com its fields; http://www.havenrock.com/ When a nation ignores the Way, Horses bear soldiers through its streets. --Lao Tzu (Peter Merel, trans.) ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
next reply index Thread overview: 8+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top 2003-07-24 4:20 Matt Gushee [this message] 2003-07-24 12:03 ` Richard Jones 2003-07-26 1:37 ` SooHyoung Oh 2003-07-26 1:55 ` SooHyoung Oh 2003-07-26 4:21 ` Matt Gushee 2003-07-26 4:34 ` Alexander V. Voinov 2003-07-26 8:45 ` [Caml-list] Re: Graphic frustration Nicolas Janin 2003-07-26 8:58 ` [Caml-list] Nicolas Janin
Reply instructions: You may reply publically to this message via plain-text email using any one of the following methods: * Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client, and reply-to-all from there: mbox Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style * Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to switches of git-send-email(1): git send-email \ --in-reply-to=20030724042004.GH441@swordfish \ --to=mgushee@havenrock.com \ --cc=caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr \ /path/to/YOUR_REPLY https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html * If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
caml-list - the Caml user's mailing list Archives are clonable: git clone --mirror https://inbox.ocaml.org/caml-list AGPL code for this site: git clone https://public-inbox.org/ public-inbox