Kore Nordmann - PHP / Projects / Politics
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:Author: 		Kore Nordmann
:Date:			Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:42:06 +0200
:Revision: 		1
:Copyright:		CC by-sa


=======================================
New features in eZ Components Graph 1.3
=======================================

:Description:
  There are some interesting new features in the driver part of the graph
  component of the eZ components - one thing I even thought is "impossible"
  until some external submission...

The drivers in the graph component are called by the renderers and transform
image primitives, like a rectangle, circle, or similar, into actual images.
The graph component currently supports Flash, GD, SVG and - since this
release - Cairo drivers.

Cairo driver
============

	Cairo is a software library used to provide a vector graphics-based,
	device-independent API for software developers. It is designed to provide
	primitives for 2-dimensional drawing across a number of different
	backends. Cairo is designed to use hardware acceleration when available.

	.. Wikipedia

Cairo is currently one of the fastest and best 2D drawing libraries, used by
Gnome, Firefox 3 and may others to render high quality graphics. Cairo is also
available in PHP through the `pecl/cairo_wrapper`__ by `Hartmut`__ and now
also in the graph component by the new driver ezcGraphCairoDriver__.

As `shown earlier`__ cairo is the fastest rendering tool in PHP, and produces
the best output. It supports everything we need in graph, like (transparent)
gradients, perfect anti aliasing and different fonts. Even the extension it
depends on is still beta you should definitely give it a try.

__ http://pecl.php.net/package/cairo_wrapper
__ http://cairo-wrapper.php-baustelle.de/trac/
__ http://ezcomponents.org/docs/api/trunk/Graph/ezcGraphCairoDriver.html
__ http://kore-nordmann.de/blog/comparison_of_php_image_libraries_update.html

SVG driver
==========

Thanks to Freddie Witherden we now got support for glyphs in SVG. Glyphs are
used in the `SVG driver`__ to provide paths for characters. This allows us to
finally estimate the exact space consumed by texts which is a really great
enhancement for the SVG support in the graph component.

To use this feature, you just need to assign a SVG font, instead of just a
name of a font. In case of a font name, the client actually renders the text,
and this depends a lot on the actual client so we weren't able to exactly
estimate where the text will end up. The SVG font may be created using ttf2svg
from `apache batik`__, which basically converts all characters defined in a
TTF font into paths, which then can be embedded in the created SVG document.

__ http://ezcomponents.org/docs/tutorials/Graph#svg-driver
__ http://xml.apache.org/batik/

Subsumption
===========

As a result the Cairo and SVG driver now support everything you need to
generate perfect and beautiful charts. Both features are available in the
latest stable release, which has `just been announced`__.

__ http://ezcomponents.org/resources/news/news-2008-06-16



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