[xep-support] scale-when-image-is-too-big (reaction to David Tolpin)

[ronald heller]

>Excellent solution, indeed.
inventive yes, excellent no ,  aah discussion :-)

>However, I would like to attract your and other users' attention to the fact
>that acrobat (or any other pdf/ps interpreter) is usually a poor quality
>performer when it comes to scaling raster images.

agreed, but not always such a big issue

>Perceived quality of the picture will inevitably decrease; the image
>will come out blurred, sharp edges will loose their sharpness.
>
>A much better approach would be to scale images to their final sizes
>using a graphics manulation program, such as Adobe Photoshop or GIMP.
>content-height/content-width are really mostly useful for drafts or
>vector images (in version 2, SVG is supported for both PDF and PS,
>EPS is for PS, in version 3, SVG supported is temporarily dropped
>but will be included in a following release; EPS is supported for PS
>and PDF inclusion into PDF will also be there soon).
>
>Raster images should not be scaled using XSL FO when print quality
>is expected.

David, allthough I agree with most of what you say, this sounds like the 
world upside down.
We use XSL FO mostly when we talk about printing on demand. High quality 
printing is a lesser issue for these kind of publications. Of course it 
should look ok.

Fop does implement the scale-to-fit value, and for XEP this really can't be 
a big problem to implement.

Scaling etc are real rendering problems, with the solution offered (to 
calculate print area width and set scaling attribute values), we are 
actually doing the job of the renderer.
All this kind of information (print area width) is known to the renderer, 
why should we calculate this in a previous process?
Not to mention that this calculating in xslt or whatever language you use 
to generate XSL FO, is a real hassle, when considering tables, lists etc.

Scale-to-fit is meant to tackle this sort of problem. Can you at least 
answer me this: Is RenderX planning to implement support for scale-to-fit 
in the near future or is it some sort of principle not to implement this 
feature?

Anyway thank you for your reply, it's much appreciated.

Grtz
Ronald


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