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The Magic Behind Tux Paint

The document discusses the "magic" behind Tux Paint, an open source drawing program for children. It describes how Tux Paint provides tools for drawing, shapes, text, stamps, and effects through plug-ins. It also summarizes how Tux Paint handles text input in different languages, scales images, renders UI text in localized languages, and more. The presentation aims to illustrate the technical details and code behind the user-facing features of Tux Paint.

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Mohan Krishna
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226 views

The Magic Behind Tux Paint

The document discusses the "magic" behind Tux Paint, an open source drawing program for children. It describes how Tux Paint provides tools for drawing, shapes, text, stamps, and effects through plug-ins. It also summarizes how Tux Paint handles text input in different languages, scales images, renders UI text in localized languages, and more. The presentation aims to illustrate the technical details and code behind the user-facing features of Tux Paint.

Uploaded by

Mohan Krishna
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Magic Behind Tux Paint

● Bill Kendrick, Lead Developer

All of the important things Tux Paint does


behind the scenes, and transparent to the
users.

Sacramento Linux Users Group


June 11, 2009
Background: What's Tux Paint?
● Drawing program for children
● Open Source (GPL)
● Written primarily in C
● Targets the Simple DirectMedia Layer API
● Ports kept up-to-date for Windows (back to
Win95), Mac OS X, BeOS and Linux
● Started in June 2002
● Part of “Tux4Kids”
Background: What does it do?
● Drawing (brushes, colors)
● Lines & shapes
● Text
● “Rubber Stamps” (clipart/photos)
● “Magic” tools (variety)
● Save/Load/Print/Un-/Redo
● Easy to use
● Highly configurable
What's the Magic?
● Magic tools (duh!)
lots of visual effects
plug-in API system
● Text tool
Input methods
bidirectional
● Stamps
Scaled PNGs
SVGs
Tinting
● UI text
Localized (80+ languages)
Nicely rendered
Note on presentation slides
● I'll be interrupting
these slides to dig
into the source
code in an editor
and talk about them
● If you're not at this
SacLUG meeting,
sorry you missed it!
Notable Magic Effects
● Bricks & Rails
● Calligraphy
● Flower & Tornado
● Real Rainbow
● Fisheye & Ripples
● Blur & Smudge
Magic API
● Callback-driven API based on events:
click, drag, release, color / tool change
● Write code in C, build as a shared object
(e.g., “.so” on Linux).
● Use 'tp-magic-config' script to
compile/install
● See a full presentation at:
http://tuxpaint.org/presentations/tuxpaint-magic-api.pdf
Text Tool – Input Methods
● Rolled out own
● Japanese
● Chinese (Traditional)
● Korean
● Thai
ひらがな
Text Tool - Bidirectional
● Using FriBidi...
● Grab Unicode characters from libSDL
● Pass them along to Input Method handler
● Construct string of wchar_t[]
● Cast wchar_t's to FriBidiChar's
● Send it to fribidi_log2vis()
● Cast FriBidiChar's back
● Display! ‫العربي‬English ‫עבְר ִית‬
ִ
Stamps – Scaled PNGs
● Bilinear scaling (optional)
● Sample 4 pixels around the 'in-between'
spot (subpixel)
● Blend them, adjusting for how much they
contribute (i.e., how close they are to the
subpixel)
● Based on:
http://www.codeproject.com/cs/media/imageprocessing4.asp
● See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilinear_filtering
Stamps - SVGs
● Old way: libcairo1, libsvg, libsvg-cairo
(based on example SDL code in Cairo
project, from 2004)
● New way: libcairo2, librsvg, librsvg-cairo
● Ask libraries to render the SVG into a
memory buffer
● Create a new SDL surface from that buffer
● Let them scale cake!
Stamp Tinting
● ... stuff I didn't write
(Thanks, Albert!)
● We can look at it, at least.
UI Text Localization
● gettext and .po files
● Python tools to manage Stamp localization
(.po↔.txt)
● Bash scripts and PHP to maintain
translation status on website
http://www.tuxpaint.org/help/po/
● Some strings used for 'scoring' fonts for the
Text tool (“can this font show characters
important for the current locale?”)
UI Text Rendering
● SDL_ttf was the old way
● SDL_Pango is the new way
● Wrapped SDL_ttf “TTF_Font*” and
SDL_Pango “SDLPango_Context*” in a
structure, “TuxPaint_Font”.
● Wrote lots of #ifdef'd management code,
then was mostly a matter of search and
replace:
s/TTF_Font/TuxPaint_Font/g
Get Tux Paint
● Website
http://www.tuxpaint.org/
● SourceForge.net
http://www.sf.net/projects/tuxpaint/
● Download builds / Download/find packages
http://www.tuxpaint.org/download/
● Download source from CVS repository
http://tuxpaint.org/download/source/cvs/
● Mailing lists, IRC, etc., too!
Thanks & happy painting coding
● Bill Kendrick
[email protected]
● You can also find me at:
the Linux Users' Group of Davis
http://www.lugod.org/
● Day job:
CTO & Lead Dev at:
Smashwords, Inc.
http://www.smashwords.com/

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