Re: OLPC and non-PNG image support

On Sun, 2007-05-06 at 17:57 -0400, Jeff wrote:
>
> Le dimanche 06 mai 2007 à 22:58 +0200, Robert Staudinger a écrit :
> > We are aware that abiword is not perfect (hardly any software is,
> > fwiw). Please understand that this is an open source project and all
> > disclaimers concerning this matter apply. Users of our product that
> > are not happy with the state of affairs are welcome to provide
> > manpower or funding towards resolution of potential issues (there's
> > precedent for both approaches).
>
> Yeah, I know, I'm not saying "hey this is sh*t, wtf are you thinking, I
> would do better within 10 seconds" or anything like that (if my original
> post sounded anything like that, my apologies; I did not mean to send
> any feeling of anger, because there really is none).
>
> I really just wanted to point out this issue as a "highly likely problem
> in the near future" with a significant user base. How to say it
> properly... it is a very visible bug, and since the OLPC toolbar (the
> one that I saw at least) has pretty much only simple formatting tools
> *and* an "add image" button, and the OLPC facilitates the creation of
> images, I am very assured that this missing feature (which I really
> think is a bug, not technically speaking) will hit the user in the face
> very soon.
>
> In short, I raised this on the mailing list because I feel the bug would
> have just crept in there unnoticed (hey, it's six years old after all).
> If this is not fixed soon, I feel it would never be. So here I am.
> That's a big issue I see with OLPC.
>
> Also, from what I saw so far of Abiword on OLPC, it seems like it's a
> simplified/stripped down version (correct me if I'm wrong). Well, I
> think it would be very great that the features that *are* available do
> work fully without being dangerous (converting jpegs to pngs silently
> *is* dangerous imho).
>
> Again, sorry for the tone of my original post if it was menacing in any
> way, it was more intended to be "folks, I am worried".
>

Hi Jeff,
        Thank you for pointing this out. This issue has been bothering
me since I noticed the extremely slow performance of AbiWord in loading
large images (over say 1600x1200).

This has crept up to become a big issue since the market take up of high
resolution digital cameras. Now 1.3 megabyte jpegs are pretty common on
computers.

I've noticed that png representations of camera images are about a
factor of 5 larger than jpegs. Put this together with the EXTREMELY low
compression of an rtf file where each pixel gets about 16 bytes to
describe it and a few large images in an rtf file give the situation you
describe.

Though I have to also say that the situation of AbiWord you describe is
also a symptom of a badly behaving kernel. There should be sufficient
swap present to load the file.

I agree that it makes sense to keep images in their native format on the
unix build of abiword where we can use gdkpixbuf to display them on
screen. We win particularly big for svg's doing things this way.

However all the document exporters will need to be patched to handle the
potential non-png images and there is a real issue about incompatible
*.abw files from unix to windows and OSX. We definitely lose back
compatibility too.

Finally the situation on OLPC may not be as bad even without this fix
for a couple of reasons:

1. The OLPC camera is only 640x480 resolution.
2. We can demand that docs get saved in gzipped abiword or odt format.

OLPC uses the libabiword PyGtk widget then build's it's own interface
around it. The version available for the B2 builds and present in many
screenshots around the web is not what will be shipped in the final
version.

The website below describes what is closer to what will be finally
shipped, although there are a number of improvements that can be made.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Write

So the question is: It it worth losing backward compatibility of *.abw
to support non-png images internally?

Frankly if the original designers of AbiWord has realized this factor of
5 difference in compression quality between png and jpeg I can't imagine
they would have chosen png.

Is there something dramatically wrong with how we're dealing with png or
is it a feature of the format?

Cheers

Martin
Received on Mon May 7 02:55:44 2007