[Bf-committers] GPencil I/O Project: Request to integrate libharu lib to export PDF format

[Ray Molenkamp]

Seems reasonable (and I agree) however playing devils advocate:

if we're going to need cairo down the road anyhow we may
as well rip that band-aid off now and deal with the pain
of building it rather than building libharu now and cairo later.

--Ray


On 2020-12-11 10:47 a.m., Brecht Van Lommel via Bf-committers wrote:
> So weighing the options, to me libharu seems like the most reasonable
> solution.
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2020 at 1:51 AM Campbell Barton via Bf-committers <
> bf-committers at blender.org> wrote:
>
>> By this logic we could blindly accept any patch that's had some production
>> testing, without considering long term maintenance.
>>
>> It's possible alternative solutions that call out to existing well
>> maintained
>> converters would have been fine in production too.
>> It's not that I'm pushing back against including this entirely,
>> I'm just not a fan of this "it worked in a production test - so lets
>> include it" -- attitude.
>>
>> Over the years I believe we've spent significant time investigating
>> issues with 3rd party libraries (resource leaks, conflicting symbols,
>> linking problems, platform specific errors etc).
>> If there is a good chance we can avoid this entirely, it could be
>> worth looking into.
>>
>> If we do include libharu, how would this be included?  in extern/ or
>> would we bundle it in SVN's lib?
>>
>> On 12/10/20 8:26 PM, Dalai Felinto wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> My suggestion would be the following:
>>>
>>> * Stick to libharu since it was proven that works for the intended use
>>> case.
>>> * Make sure libharu integration in the code goes via a layer of
>>> abstraction.
>>>
>>> So instead of trying now to solve an non-existent problem, we use
>>> development time to make sure the existing solution is robust enough to
>>> be replaced if needs be.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Dalai
>>>
>>> On 09-12-2020 23:34, Campbell Barton via Bf-committers wrote:
>>>> rsvg-convert (which uses cairo), is a utility that converts SVG to
>>>> PDF, it can create multi-page PDF's from many SVG's too.
>>>>
>>>> If for some reason we need more control then a command line utility
>>>> provides, there are Python multiple options regarding bindings for
>>>> cairo & svg conversion.
>>>>  From what I can tell they can convert SVG to PDF quite easily.
>>>>
>>>> Regarding bundling the conversion tools, if this it's only a few
>>>> studios with specific requirements, we don't _necessarily_ need to
>>>> include the conversion utilities with Blender, although this is a
>>>> decision we could easily change.
>>>>
>>>> I'm not pushing for this as the final solution, just checking if it
>>>> might be a simpler option compared to taking on a PDF library that
>>>> isn't maintained anymore.
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