GDI+ Library

[Deepaak]

Please some one point to a good GDIPlus Library for Freepascal.

[taazz]

I have used the GDI+ library from prodigy (the author of the UIB and various libraries for delphi) with out any changes directly in free pascal.

[Deepaak]

I have used the GDI+ library from prodigy (the author of the UIB and various libraries for delphi) with out any changes directly in free pascal.

where to download this library.
http://www.progdigy.com/ does not respond.

[taazz]

Find attached the copy I use in Lazarus.

[Deepaak]

Find attached the copy I use in Lazarus.

Thank You very very much. :-)
Why not this library is  included in freepascal/lazarus. GDI+ is a very nice library and is required on many occasions in windows programming.

[taazz]

Well I guess there are many reasons that it hasn't be included for example no one contributed the library, the library is windows only which makes it unsuitable for inclusion in the project, etc.

[marcov]

I haven't heard many good things about GDI+. Slow and unstable.

That said, if there is a decent header with a suitable license, I see no problem including it.

[taazz]

The rar I posted is mpl licensed and what ever little usage I got out of it was stable enough for me as for speed I never actually made any speed tests against other libraries of the same caliber like cairo. In short mainly because it is very similar to GDI I find gdi+ more convenient to use.

[sam707]

GDIplus ? I havn't hear about since windows 3.11 when i wanted to run some cubersome win95 2D only games, sprites based, which did need 32bits libraries on my 16bits windows. that was one of the primary goals of that slow and ugly library yup !

I recommend you to use openGL, faster , better , nicer.. and cross platform...

R.I.P. gdi+ ------- DirectDraw from DirectX did a nice shot hahahaha !

  printf("that was %s\r\n","fun");
  amen();

don't you know ? we don't use anymore wax tablets Julius Caesar shud be mad at us 

[taazz]

well I think you have a point especially if you think that GDI+ was introduced as an addon for windows XP and it didn't exist before that.

[BigChimp]

Yes. These time traveling messages are a bit unsettling, to be frank.

@deepaak: I'm interested: did you use the library? Was it satisfactory?

[sam707]

well I think you have a point especially if you think that GDI+ was introduced as an addon for windows XP and it didn't exist before that.

I dont "think" , I "know" , I dont "pretend" , I "live", dear young men who "need" to learn where I just have to remember.

microsoft maybe bought gdiplus while launching XP, but it existed as a graphic lib as i told it, under win 3.11 16 bits

[Deepaak]

Yes. These time traveling messages are a bit unsettling, to be frank.

@deepaak: I'm interested: did you use the library? Was it satisfactory?

Still working on it. Used few times in c++ and got Some nice results. But in pascal, this is my first time.

[Deepaak]

Chris Jackson published some tests indicating that a piece of
text rendering code he had written could render
99,000 glyphs per second in GDI, but the same
code using GDI+ rendered 16,600 glyphs per
second.

Source : http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Device_Interface

Yes Gdi+ is slow compared to GDI.

Some one told here for Opengl, I never used it before. Can it be used for GUI Components. What Files are distributed along with it.

And any startup examples.

[taazz]

Well those two can not be compared in my opinion for starters GDI uses integer arithmetic while GDI+ uses singles that has an impact on execution speed. Even farther the drawing methods have changed immensely having various effects that most of the time will touch more pixels than the GDI counter parts.

As such a naive comparison of those will show nothing of value is there a speed difference yes there is but if you remove all the effects while drawing then the speed difference is not observable by the naked eye sort of speak. My speed tests against gdi shown that a conservative use of effects will slow down drawing operations around 10~15% from GDI which I find acceptable for the results it produces.

As I said I haven't tested against Cairo which is a much more logical comparison so I can't say if GDI+ is truly slow or not.