Flake is snowballing!

Since a week I've delved into a library the KOffice devs are creating; its called libFlake. The goal of the library is to have the best of both worlds from KWords frames and KPresenter shapes down to Karbons vector graphics. To do this we provide a low level object called a Shape and provide hooks for the high level stuff so they can be build on top. This way we can move shape-manipulation and shape-painting (including painting to PDF) for all KOffice applications into one library with the obvious advantage that any cool component build in a specific application will be really easy to reuse in other KOffice apps.

After a week of working the most important features needed by KWord are already in there;

• Shapes can be given a size in millimeters and they draw in the correct size on any monitor/paper.
• Shapes can be grouped so I can add a text area to always be below an image.
• These same groups can be used to do interresting stuff like anchored frames, where a frame moves if the parent moves but also when the text is altered and it moves down the anchor.
• Each shape can drawn rotated, scaled and skewed without actually changing the content. So you can easily rotate that text, if you want.
• Some shape-manipulation tools have been implemented some time ago and they now have undo/redo support.
• We have only a move tool but we surely need more (any volunteers?) The goal here is to provide all features from http://www.koffice.org/developer/keyboardmodifiers.php in flake so applications don't have to do it separately!

There are loads of painting optimizations and speedups to create in there, which is one of the things I will be working on in the next weeks :)