[Ipe-discuss] pre26 and Qt 4.1

[Otfried Cheong]

> 1) It seems that Qt 4.x still has many rough edges. For example, many 
> buttons in the Ipe interface show only part of their text.  Making the 
> window larger doesn't help.
> 
> 2) When opening a file, the file selector shows only 2-3 characters of 
> the directory name followed by dots.  The name is shown ok when the 
> "long" kind of listing is selected.  

1) and 2) appear to be a Qt bug - it's #126 in Ipe Bugzilla.  The 
workaround is to delete the "font" line in "~/.config/TrollTech.conf".

> 3) The most significant problem: the rendering of text in Ipe (Latex 
> text) is very poor.  I read the discussion on the list on anti-aliasing, 
> and I see that the text rendering improves *somewhat* when I disable 
> anti-aliasing, but is still very bad.

This hasn't been reported before.  Can you post a bug and attach a 
screen shot of the misrendered text?

My completely uninformed guess is that this may be another freetype 
problem.  Freetype has a habit of making changes in the interface 
between versions that break applications.  Are you using the same 
freetype as when you built pre23?
(see http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=316031 for a 
discussion of freetype versioning issues).

I have no problems with text rendering on either Windows or Linux. 
However, as far as I know, nobody else seems to have used it under SunOS 
before.  Perhaps it's a Qt bug in bitmap rendering (I'm sure Trolltech 
doesn't make a big effort supporting Sun anymore), or perhaps I'm 
assuming the wrong endianness somewhere - I would need to see pictures 
before speculating further.

> Out of curiosity, what motivated the move to Qt 4?

The most important reason is the Qt 4 is open-source and released under 
GPL on all three platforms.  Previously, I had to make do with a very 
old version (2.3.0) of Qt for Windows, which I had  purchased in 1999. 
It was quite unpleasant to support both Qt 2 and Qt 3 in parallel - now 
I have to worry about one version only, and can use the state of the art 
tools on both platforms that I'm developing, building and testing on 
myself, namely Windows and Linux.

Qt 4 has a number of improvements that will show up in Ipe sooner or 
later.  Rendering of complicated paths on the screen has already 
improved a lot, and anti-aliased edges do look good.  In the future, 
expect transparency, clipping, and gradient patterns.

Otfried