kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Dick Hollenbeck <dick@...>]

> In our company we Qt for almost 5 years now. We have never been dissapointed 
> by it. I do not want to make any advertisment, but please take a look at the 
> documentation of QGraphicsScene, QGraphicsItem,....


Rok and others,

I did look at the QGraphicsScene. It is a container class that uses 
QPainter to draw the objects that it contains.

I think we are pretty happy with our containers, namely BOARD for 
instance. Changing that in order to use a graphics class is out of the 
question. We like being able to draw subsets of what we have in our 
container.


However, the class that is most interesting to us should be QPainter. 
It seems worthy of more study, by more than just me, buy by me too.

There are two aspects that need to be looked at:


1) the API that is presents, and


2) the graphics library stack that it uses to implement its API contract.


The graphics library stack seems to be variable based on platform, but 
is mostly stable for larger (non-embedded) systems. OpenGL comes up, 
please look.


The API contract does not change.


There may actually be pieces of code, or as a minimum, ideas, that could 
be re-used from this, without actually switching to a Qt.
(If I was part of the wxGraphicsContext team for wxWidgets, I would have 
my nose in this code full time.)


The other thing that probably most folks know but I mention anyway is 
that the Windows license for Qt has recently become more free, now GPL. 


Dick