[docs] Updated NEWS.xml

[adg.git] / docs / gnu / NEWS.xml

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<!DOCTYPE chapter PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
                         "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd">

<chapter id="NEWS">
<title>News archive</title>
<subtitle>Summary of changes between releases</subtitle>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.5.4">
<title>ADG 0.5.4</title>

<para>AdgTable now provides a generic tabular entity customizable with
AdgTableStyle. It supports unlimited rows with independent cells.</para>

<para>Some new special entities, such as AdgLogo (the official ADG logo)
and AdgProjection (showing the drawing projection scheme) have
been implemented.</para>

<para>A bare title block entity, AdgTitleBlock, is now available: it is
allowed to set its cells content either by using string values or
custom entities.</para>

<para>AdgAlignment is a new container entity that allows to traslate its
children of a custom factor of the children boundary box: any
entity can now be right aligned or centered.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.5.3">
<title>ADG 0.5.3</title>

<para>AdgRDim, a new entity to quote radial dimensions, is now available.</para>

<para>A bunch of new classes to manage hatches have been implemented.
Specifically, AdgHatch is the entity to be added to the canvas,
AdgFillStyle a generic abstract class that wraps cairo_pattern_t
and AdgRuledFill the AdgFillStyle implementation to fill an hatch
with a serie of parallel lines with custom spacing and angle.</para>

<para>The AdgModel now supports named pairs, that is any coordinates
can be set explicitely (as before) or as a reference to a pair
set by the model. The AdgPoint helper class is the object used
to manage this relationship. The API of dimension entities has
been updated to accept AdgPoint instead of plain AdgPair.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.5.2">
<title>ADG 0.5.2</title>

<para>AdgADim, a new entity to quote angular dimensions, is implemented.</para>

<para>The linear dimensions now accept the "outside" property to reflect
the arrows around the extension lines. The default value of this
property is ADG_THREE_STATE_UNKNOWN, meaning it will be computed at
runtime, depending on quote size and available space.</para>

<para>The new AdgEdges model can now be used to programmatically build a
serie of vertical lines expressing the edges of another model. This
can be used on symmetrical shapes, often met in turned parts.</para>

<para>The entities now actively respond to extents requests: it is possible
to know the necessary space before rendering them. Any matrix change
now emits specific signals to fulfill this requirement.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.5.1">
<title>ADG 0.5.1</title>

<para>The new AdgMarker abstract class has been added to provide a common
ancestor to marker entities. AdgArrow (a filled arrow) is its first
renderable implementation.</para>

<para>The rendering customization is now provided by AdgDress, an index that
virtualizes the underlying AdgStyle and derived instances. This allows
some advanced operation, such as overriding a style in a specific branch
of the entity hierarchy. The deprecated AdgContext class has been removed.</para>

<para>The AdgPath class has been splitted in AdgTrail and AdgPath. The former
provides low level access to CpmlPath, allowing the implementation of
paths that do not fit in the global/local model. AdgLDim internally
uses a private AdgTrail to implement base and extension lines rendering.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.5.0">
<title>ADG 0.5.0</title>

<para>The old paper-model matrix approach has been superseded by a cleaner and
smarter approach based on global/local maps. This resulted in a great
code complexity reduction: check out the home page for further details.</para>

<para>Parent-child relationship is no more tied to AdgContainer: dependencies
between AdgEntities can now be expressed without a full-fledged container.</para>

<para>AdgDim now uses internally four AdgToyText entities to render the quote.
This has been made possible by the new parent-child APIs, simplyfing the
rendering code a lot.</para>

<para>A bunch of classes, most notably AdgRotable, AdgTranslatable and AdgPoint,
have been superseded by the new global/local map approach and have been
removed from the project.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.4.3">
<title>ADG 0.4.3</title>

<para>Higher level operators, such as chamfer and fillet, can now be used
in the path definition. They do not work yet for Bézier curves but
the infrastructure is in place.</para>

<para>A Gtk+ widget for easily showing the canvas has been implemented. It
is based on GtkDrawingArea and provides some interaction throught the
mouse, such as zooming and panning. It is not viable for serious work
but it is funny to use and opened to improvements.</para>

<para>The CPML library has been enriched with the missing functions
needed by the above new features. Now it has a ..._length() and
..._near_pos() families of functions. The mathematic behind this
library is far from complete: the overall design is quite stable
but there are a lot of placeholders, especially when curves were
involved.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.4.2">
<title>ADG 0.4.2</title>

<para>The work on model-view separation has been started: the AdgModel
abstract class is now in place. Above this class, the new AdgPath
model is derived, providing a full set of APIs to construct paths
from scratch. Also, AdgPath gives full access the model throught
CPML, allowing to modify and manipulate the path data.</para> 

<para>The CPML library now natively supports arcs. Although cairo does
not recognize arcs, a lot of work has been done to hide the
complexity needed to provide an API that does the necessary
trasformations transparently.</para>

<para>The old AdgPath entity has been rewrote to AdgStroke. This is a
stroked view of an AdgPath model. Its implementation is trivial
as all the path complexity has moved to AdgPath.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.4.1">
<title>ADG 0.4.1</title>

<para>The CPML library has been boosted with additional APIs to browse
segments/primitives and to compute intersections between different
constructs. Now it has its own demo program (cpml-demo), showing
some of the implemented feature. Although some function is still
a stub, the overall infrastructure is likely to be definitive.</para>

<para>All the CPML APIs are now properly documented.</para>

<para>The ldim demo has been merged into the more complex adg-demo.
Now the demo programs use the GtkBuilder feature, so the Gtk+
dependency has been raised to 2.12.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.4.0">
<title>ADG 0.4.0</title>

<para>The useless wrappers in AdgPath have been removed: now the standard
cairo path API could be used in the path constructor callback.</para>

<para>AdgPoint has been added. This new core struct can be used to represent
a coordinate system with different model and space component.</para>

<para>The new AdgToyText entity can be used to show arbitrary text using the
cairo "toy" text API.</para>

<para>Two interfaces, AdgTranslatable and AdgRotable, have been implemented
to allow arbitrary positioning (using the new AdgPoint struct) and
rotation of entities where this is applicable (e.g. AdgToyText).</para>

<para>The CPML API has been almost rewrote from scratch: removed a lot of
duplicated stuff, dropped CpmlPath (by using the original cairo_path_t)
and implemented new functions, such as segment browsing (always in
forward direction), reversing and transformation.</para>

<para>README, NEWS, TODO and ChangeLog are now automatically generated, so
redundancy is removed and the maintainability improved. The originals
are kept in docbook format, allowing to use them also in html version.</para>

<para>The adg-demo program now allows to save the sample drawing in png, pdf
and postscript. Two useless toy text entities has been added.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.3.2">
<title>ADG 0.3.2</title>

<para>The dependency on libgcontainer has been dropped: now the adg canvas
requires only cairo and Gtk+2 (will be optional). This allows to try
the demo program (demo/adg-demo) on any decent GNU/Linux distribution
without installing anything.</para>

<para>The container logic has been included in AdgEntity (the GChildable
portion) and AdgContainer (the GContainerable part).</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.3.1">
<title>ADG 0.3.1</title>

<para>Implemented the "invalidate" signal to force the cache recomputation
on a new rendering operation.</para>

<para>The new cairo "toy" API has been used to do text management in AdgDim.
This allows caching of the intermediate glyphs for improved
performances (no profiling yet done). The cairo dependency has been
raised to version 0.7.4 or more.</para>

<para>The AdgLDim entity has been rewritten to full implement the new cache
design. Other entities have been improved to allow a paper matrix
other than the default identity matrix.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.3.0">
<title>ADG 0.3.0</title>

<para>Reworked styles and implemented AdgContext, a clean and well defined
approach to manage rendering customization.</para>
 
<para>Moved all the geometrical stuff in Cairo Path Manipulation Library
(CPML), an internal library depending only on cairo.</para>
  
<para>Greatly improved documentation.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.2.2">
<title>ADG 0.2.2</title>

<para>Strongly separated model and paper matrix concepts and updated their
management using nested transformations.</para>
 
<para>Reworked the rendering process in a cleaner way by propagating the
"render" signal and using internal entity states to let the application
know what changed from the previous rendering.</para>

</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.2.1">
<title>ADG 0.2.1</title>

<para>Reworked the sources tree in a cleaner way (to help future development)
and used private structs instead of populating the instance structure.</para>
 
</simplesect>

<simplesect id="NEWS.0.2.0">
<title>ADG 0.2.0</title>
 
<para>This is the first public release of the ADG library. It is in a early
stage of developement, but the goal is quite ambitious!</para>

</simplesect>

</chapter>