Canvas Element for rendering PDFs ? (split)

[Hooray]

5. - try to get .pdf handling/rendering into Canvas (a simple .pdf viewer like that offered by google, or sort of, might be quick-and-easy- to setup), so to have a decent resolution and smooth details; should this not been possible, we go for .jpg, but hi-res .jpg (from the Charts source!)

I checked the OSG source tree and examples there, the C++ code is directly dealing with an osg::Image and the cpp file is just 100 lines, so it seems fairly compact:

• https://github.com/openscenegraph/osg/b ... /PdfReader
• https://github.com/openscenegraph/osg/b ... Reader.cpp

Adapting our CanvasImage code to also support PDF files should be fairly straightforward and not even take very long - so we can revisit this post 3.2 and I can also post some patches to get this started.

[Hooray]

Subject: Space Shuttle

I am fairly sure the flight manual and the DPS dictionary are public domain. I've discussed the possibility of distributing them with the Shuttle with Richard already, the problem is a bit that the manual alone is 1300 pages and 43 MB - so it'd create quite the heavy folder.

The p51d in FGAddon is currently at 1020M, so it's not without precedent (though that size is a little big). It might be also possible to decrease the quality of any PDFs a little to drop the size. It would be good to have everything self contained, for easy reference. Was the procedure to carry these on the shuttle for quick lookups? Hmmm, I'm now wondering about a canvas PDF viewer!

See: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_Development#PDF

It may make sense to revisit this idea, supporting a subset of PDF would not be too difficult, but it would be better to really use a PDF library and OSG's built-in suport for rendering a PDF to a texture, which could the be easily turned into a new Canvas Element, as per the example at: http://wiki.flightgear.org/Canvas_Devel ... ew_Element

The coding part is relatively straightforward (basically copy&paste), but getting the dependencies/cmake magic right for all supported FG platforms would probably require a bit of work.