Hi Larry (Becker),

I'm slowly progressing on this topic.
I added different rendering modes in RenderingManager,
Except the printing stuff, there are only a few classes where new modes are used.
I tested the change on AbstractZoomTool :
In OpenJUMP, MouseWheel zoom is done on an INTERACTIVE mode
In SkyJUMP, you use the EXECUTE_ON_EVENT_THREAD mode
I feel like INTERACTIVE mode gives a better feedback on large datasets
Is there any motivation to have changed rendering mode to
EXECUTE_ON_EVENT_THREAD in SKYJump for mousewheel zoom ?

Michaël

Hi Michaël,

Thanks for starting this effort. I'll try to answer your questions as best I can. When I wrote this code four years ago, I was immersed in printer lore that I have mostly forgotten. Here are a few things that I can recall: (excuse my lecture tone, I know you are very knowledgeable on the subject of rendering)

1. Rendering for interactive display has completely different goals than rendering for printing. It is mostly an issue of responsiveness vs. quality. The JUMP render architecture, as you well know, has excellent responsiveness and an especially quick redraw capability thanks to per-layer double buffering. In this aspect it far outperforms ArcMap and many other GIS programs. While this is a positive for interactive use, it is a huge negative for printer rendering. Having a timer-based repaint from an off-screen buffer occur while printing causes the output to change from vector to raster mode, so defeating double-buffering is very important.

2. The next issue is that rendering can be multi-threaded and this can cause problems for the inherently linear print process. The best mode for printing is to render on the GUI thread because this will block other things from interfering with the print process. This causes side effects such as blocking communication with WMS and other server based layers, but this is taken care of in the PrinterDriver by creating a Runnable to run in a separate task, but under control of the PrinterDriver.

3. The next issue is resolution. Normally, of course, we render to screen resolution which is usually between 72 and 120 dots per inch or a pixel size of .~ 28 mm. I do some tricks to increase the apparent resolution without changing the scale. This is especially an issue when there are raster layers. The PrinterPlugin interface has options to double the resolution of raster layers so that even when zooming in on a PDF it still appears smooth.

4. There is the issue of transparency. This is supported in PDF so it isn't a problem there, but it will cause problems for a real printer. The UI has options to defeat transparency and other style settings that might not look quite so nice on a printer.

5. There are also issues of line width scaling that make linestrings almost invisible at printer resolutions.

Getting back to more practical advice about implementing PDF generation in OpenJump, I would recommend you start first by implementing the SkyJUMP PrinterDriver and PrinterPlugin. This will allow you to print to PDF with a free PDF print driver without getting into the iText library. You can experiment with commenting out the RenderManager enhancements to see the effects, which for some situations may not be too bad. Once you get the driver working it should be easy add the iText library which gives the direct PDF generation with layers.

When testing the PDF output always determine first if it is generating true vectors by zooming in fully. Then you may also see the effects of decimation as implemented in Java2DConverter and even in java.awt.Graphics2D.

That's all for now. I've rambled on enough. Let me know what else I can clarify.

Regards,

Larry





    On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 3:00 AM, Michaël Michaud
    <michael.mich...@free.fr <mailto:michael.mich...@free.fr>> wrote:

        Hi Larry (Becker),

        I've started pdf printer integration in openjump and the main
        change that I face
        is one in RenderingManager where you introduced 3 rendering mode
        public final static int INTERACTIVE = 0;
        public final static int SINGLE_THREAD_QUEUE = 1;
        public final static int EXECUTE_ON_EVENT_THREAD = 2;

        Before I port this change to OpenJUMP (maybe I'll wait after
        1.6 release),
        I'd like to have a better vision of what problem it is
        supposed to solve and
        to know if it is related to the add of printing capabilities.

        Thanks for all,

        Michaël





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