[tools-dev] Transformable GC

["Andreas F. Bobak" <bobak.eclipse@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there

I had the need to do some more enhanced graphics context magic than
just drawing horizontal text, so I went ahead and created a GC that
is transformable: rotate, scale, translate. Hence, I dubbed it 
"Transformable GC".

In my opinion this would make a reasonable enhancement for SWT in
general. The question of how to draw a rotated text with SWT pops up
quite a few times on the newsgroups...

So far I have a working package for carbon and win32. On the win32
platform I use GDI+ which comes by default with WinXP. Luckily, there
is a  redristributable DLL available from MS for older Windows versions.

You can d/l screenshots of the test application and of a more
complicated example here: http://www.abstrakt.ch/tgc/

The reason I went for GDI+ is simple: I wanted anti-aliasing.

In conjunction with the Java API AffineTransform, it should be fairly
straightforward to create a version that only uses SWT calls, at least
on Windows (one can get a rotated Font by using LOGFONT.lfEscapement).

Now for this package to really make sense it should go either directly
into SWT, or it should be distributed as a separate project à la GEF. A
separate project would probably make more sense at the time being, as
I haven't ported it to any other platform than carbon and win32.

If there's a chance -- what would be the process of getting something
like this accepted as a separate plugin (like GEF)? Obviously I'm
willing to donate the code and spend more time on this.

Regards
    -andreas
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