Call for a contributor: LC Server enhancement

[Alex Tweedly]

On 30/03/2019 21:56, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode wrote:
> Given that it's taken years to get approval for -f, I'm reluctant to 
> overload the task with too many additional features at the outset, 
> though perhaps as a separate scope of work it may be worth pursuing if 
> we can find someone to implement it.
>
> What sorts of things are you building that use specific fonts in 
> generated graphics on the server?
>
In reality, so far, none.

In principle - perhaps many, but I wouldn't know :-)

My current project is to build a Graphing Library (driven by a specific 
desktop app that I'm developing for personal/family use). Neither 
ChartsEngine nor ChartMaker is suitable (they don't support the specific 
kind of hybrid graph I need), so I'm building an open-source LC Graphing 
library.

There's no reason why it couldn't run on LCServer (and good reason why 
it might be useful - the app I'm building as the primary use-case could 
easily be run on the family web-site). So it would generate the graphics 
inside a group, take a snapshot of that, and include that JPG file in 
the web site output.

The library allows for titles, axis labels, grid/tick labels, a legend, 
etc. - all of which allow setting of text size, color, font, etc. - so 
could require specific fonts.

Right now it doesn't all work (I'm slowly fighting my through various 
difficulties in the Server implementation - I think caused by the fact 
that there are no inherited properties from the card/stack, but more 
likely caused by my bugs :-), and indeed even the desktop version is 
incomplete; but I hope to have it ready for beta release sometime this 
Spring.

And then I can get back to actually building the real app that I wanted 
in the first place :-)

Alex.