[scribus] To Outline Or Not To Outline?

[a.l.e]

On Thu, 28 Jul 2011 09:22:59 -0600
Mike Sleger <chappa-ai at q.com> wrote:

> I have a quad-core processor, so hopefully
> the Scribus design architecture takes advantage of multi-threading to
> the different cores.

no, it won't. sorry to deceive you.

writing multi-threaded apps is mostly a hard task.
(most of all if you're using a language like c++ which has not been built around the idea of threads!)

> But rather than redraw the entire document, why
> not just redrawing only the visible portion?
> If a user is zoomed in
> to see only a quarter of a page, why redraw the entire document (or
> even the entire page for that matter)?  Redrawing should only be
> needed when panning or zooming, excluding the visible area which
> should always be redrawn.

because it's not that easy to know which parts need to be redrawn, when and what is its content.

at the end, you may be doing more complicated calculations which will slow down your app instead of speeding it up...



joining your two remarks: redrawing the screen is a typical task which can be multi-threaded... but the multi-threading makes the task even harder...

the devs know that those are good ideas! but they're also aware that it will be a big task to implement them correctly (so we need somebody who does not know that it's so hard and simply does it!)



have fun
a.l.e