[Scribus] Scribus / XaraLX files

[Craig Ringer]

frank gaude' wrote:

> Thanks, Craig. From Charles Moir, Xara Ltd., re this subject:
> 
> " CDraw on its own doesn't help create a stand-alone browser, as it's 
> just the really low level, and very dumb, rendering engine. In order to 
> create a stand-alone renderer that can take .xar files we need a much 
> larger chunk of Xara Xtreme LX. However we do hope to create exactly 
> this at some point. i.e. a simple library that can render .xar files, 
> that could then be used by third parties for a number of things, such as 
> browser plug-in, or stand-alone file viewer."

Yep, I spoke with the Xara guys at LGM about just this. In the shorter 
term we talked about launching the full app in the background, and 
communicating with it (think shared memory, pipes, etc) to do the 
rendering work. Somewhat clumsier, but still effective, and a whole lot 
better than a flakey, incomplete file importer that takes a massive 
amount of work to write.

Anything like that would need to wait on the full modularization of 
frames, so it's not super practical until a LOT of work is done on the 
Scribus core. It could probably be done now, but it'd be a lot more work 
due to the way Scribus handles frames and the way the drawing and PDF 
output code is structured.

--
Craig Ringer