[fitz-dev] Re: Comparison with Fresco

[Fritz Wuehler]

> But I'm not going to try to sort out such misunderstandings; your
> previous behaviour on fresco-devel has left me sufficiently
> convinced that such attempts are a waste of time.

Shame on you for that preposterous flame-bait. It's not even logically
coherent.

Raph's Quaker beliefs are an encouragement to me. Quakers are
wonderful people, I share many of their beliefs, and propose that we
imitate a society of friends. There is room in every friendship for
frank opinions. Fresco subscribers wrote me private thanks for
clarifying LGPL pitfalls on fresco-dev, and I sent the list archive to
OSI for their consideration.

In the context of Fitz, I understand Raph's GPL-based business model,
and do not seek to overthrow it. Recently I did send notes to Tor
about AEkit, but since then I've realized that it will eventually
migrate from Tor's Charcoal graphics to Fitz, and thus to GPL, so the
subject is moot.

Although I will not contribute code for licensing reasons, I am still
interested in understanding these projects.

> Fitz and Fresco have radically different goals, at least as I
> understand Fitz. Fresco aims to provide a GUI system; Fitz aims to
> provide a rendering library.
> Fitz has the goal of _rendering_ PS/PDF; that's totally different from
> rendering _to_ PDF, which seems to be what you're talking about here.

It's probably more correct to say that their centers of gravity are
different.

(a) Fitz will undergird AEkit, a GUI system -- so GUI is a partial
design driver for Fitz. GUI requirements were stated in Fitz docs and
mail threads, along with several others.

(b) There is significant overlap in the two goals anyway, e.g. scene
graphs, animation, event handling, rendering, anti-aliasing, etc.
Whether one is doing PDF rendering or vector-based GUIs, the same
problems must be addressed. In fact you could say that Apple did both
at the same time in Quartz (a PDF-based vector GUI system rendered in
OpenGL). I agree with you that "there are obvious parallels between
the Fitz display tree and the Fresco scene graph" and venture that
there are more parallels beyond that. I'm just asking.

M.