Compiling SVG to C++

The problem is that creating visually appealing widgets is rather difficult. The number of developers who can draw is about equal to the number of artists who know math ;) (and that's an extremely small number). Sometimes people ask me to do, what seems to be, absolutely trivial things, like giving them some code to do rounded rectangles. Having mockups doesn't help here because there's a long way from going from a semi-transparent gray rounded rectangle without an outline to : QPen pen(Qt::NoPen); QBrush brush(QColor(193,193,193,127)); painter.setPen(pen); painter.setBrush(brush); painter.drawRoundRect(10, 20, 80, 60, 25, 25);.

I was trying to figure out how can we make it easier. Using SVG is a very obvious solution. Sometimes though you want to make it a little bit more custom and using SVG might not seem like the best idea. I sat down after work today and created a SVG to C++ compiler. It's pretty interesting. You can do a mockup in your favourite SVG editor and then compile it to C++ and you have a widget. Or an artist could do a mockup and send the compiled widget and the svg to a developer who can then go nuts. Given that I've spent on it about 2 hours so far it's very basic. I'll try to see about releasing that code sometime soon. Right now it's based on an internal research implementation of SVG (yeah, I wrote of a few) I did a while back for Trolltech, so we'll have to figure out what to do with it. It's an interesting route that I'm not 100% convinced makes all that much sense. Maybe it would be better to just be able to say widget->fromSvg("svgfile.svg"); and have some api to figure out the shape/look of the widget directly from an SVG.

Anyway, sample generated output and the svgfile used to generate it, is at: http://ktown.kde.org/~zrusin/examples/svgtocpp.tar.bz2.