Virtual Pen Project History (résumé du 1er mai 2003 )

All development on the project has been suspended. This is, hopefully, only a temporary development freeze. But we can't promise anything.

Working on a managed wrapper for the Grafix library. Implementing the wrapper in managed C++ is an interesting exercise, but also a somewhat frustrating one...
Thinking about CR, preparing document for next Epsitec meeting.

Added a cache for glyph size measurement in the Grafix library, at the TypeFace level.
Thinking about CR.

Design and thinking about a new GUI toolkit for both Virtual Pen and the new CR project.

Use updated 4.0 version of the Unicode LineBreak data file.
Removed outdated test projects from the VP solution.
Added new method VP.FrontEnd.Controllers.DocView.Activate, which both activates the main window and sets the focus to the raw document view.
The I-beam method HandleKeyboardSpy will activate the main window whenever the user presses the ESC key, even if the main window was already active (the activation also sets the focus, see above).
Improved focus management in VP.Forms.Graphis.DocView and VP.PlugIn.TextRuler.Form.
Changed the ruler from a floating form to a panel which is embedded in the document view.
Added a new class VP.Forms.KeySinkingPanel which provides the same support as KeySinkingForm.

Cleaned up the Virtual Pen solution after all the experimentation work. Removed unused test code and improved the MSI Setup project.
Back-ported modifications I did last week because of VS.NET 2003. These were tiny C++ conformance problems not spotted by VS.NET 2002.
Found why the Release version crashed miserably on last Friday morning. The initialisation code for the Grafix DLL was called in a #if _DEBUG section...
I compared VTune and DevPartner Studio with an agg2 sample; each tool has its own weakness, and I would love to have one which would offer both features. VTune is great for finding hot spots quickly, even without instrumenting, and DevPartner provides far better instrumentation (at the cost of a very slow execution). And DevPartner cannot instrument code in templates, which is annoying for agg2 performance tuning !

I have still not recovered fully. My back aches awfully. I tried to read and understand what the current version of Crésus Facturation was all about...
Tried out Numega (or is it Compuware) DevPartner Studio version 7 for VS.NET. It is quite interesting, but building the Core DLL took more than 5 hours of link time, which is not acceptable for a daily use. I still have a few days left for evaluation, but I doubt I will spend a few thousand dollars on it.
Tried out Intel VTune 7, the latest release. They consider that 7 days are enough to evaluate their product. It is amazing : without instrumenting the code, it provides a quite good view of where the time is spent, thanks to the use of internal CPU event counters (from what I understand). But the documentation is really poor; I was expecting something along the lines of what Compuware ships...

Could not show VP at Computer as planned. The version is too unstable and slow, and too reduced in its functionality.

Fixed radius of outline detection. The radius was considered in document points rather than pixels. Introducing the zoom factor helps command DetectObjectOutlineAtPos to convert from points to what will effectively become an equivalent pixel size.
Added support in VP::Tools::NamedImage for a stretched representation of the image (this represents a simple cache), based on VP::Tools::BitmapImage.
Finally implemented the visual feed-back for text and image candidates. This inserts stretched versions of the images (VP::Tools::NamedImage) provided by the front-end (a big "A" for the text candidates, a postcard image for image candidates).
Built a release version of Virtual Pen : it does not work properly !