Flake or a Vector Shape is a

programming library In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and su ...

that is used in

Calligra Suite Calligra Suite is a graphic art and office suite by KDE. It is available for desktop PCs, tablet computers, and smartphones. It contains applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentation, databases, vector graphics, and digital paintin ...

and the

KOffice KOffice is a free and open source office and graphics suite developed by KDE for Unix-like and Windows systems. KOffice contains a word processor ( KWord), a spreadsheet (KSpread), a presentation program ( KPresenter), and a number of other comp ...

2 series. Flake provides the basic concept of a "shape". To the end user a shape appears as some piece of content such as an image or a text. A shape can be in any form (square, circle, etc.) and contain any kind of media since the Shape is responsible for drawing itself. All components of KOffice are being overhauled to use Flake as much as possible.

Functionality

The functionality of Flake is divided up between Shapes, which display content, and Tools, which manipulate content or the user interface. Different Shapes can be created to support different kinds of content, for example the text-shape in Calligra Words would support

.txt A text file (sometimes spelled textfile; an old alternative name is flatfile) is a kind of computer file that is structured as a sequence of lines of electronic text. A text file exists stored as data within a computer file system. In operat ...

and

.odt The Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), also known as OpenDocument, is an open file format for word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations and graphics and using ZIP-compressed XML files. It was developed w ...

formats while the KChart shape would just support chart-related document standard such as .odc. Shapes are packaged with a set of tools to manipulate that kind of content and UI elements that expose the functionality to the user. This provides an application with all the features it needs and also allows for easy embedding of Shapes in other applications. Shapes can load other shapes when needed, for example when images are in text documents the image shape will be loaded to handle the images. Flake is the successor to the old design of embedding based on widgets in the KOffice 1 series. The widget embedding had three notable shortcomings, that widgets were always square, couldn't be rotated and were measured in pixels. All of these are corrected by Flake. Embedded document data can now be zoomed, rotated and skewed, be of any form and are measured in units such as millimeters. Flake also improves on the original design in several areas, for example, its extensibility. For example, in Google's Summer of Code 2007 Marijn Kruisselbrink created a

MusicXML MusicXML is an XML-based file format for representing Western musical notation. The format iopen fully documented, and can be freely used under the W3C Community Final Specification Agreement. History MusicXML was invented by Michael Good and in ...

-based

music notation Music is generally defined as the art of arranging sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm or otherwise expressive content. Exact definitions of music vary considerably around the world, though it is an aspect ...

Shape and Tools. Shapes can be made aware of other Shapes positions, moving an image through text will result in the text dynamically wrapping around the images. Shapes can even be grouped together and made to behave like a single Shape. Flake also supports printing to PDF and has full support for anti-aliased painting for smoother text.KDE Community Wiki: Calligra/Libs/Flake
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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Flake (Kde) Calligra Suite Computer libraries KDE Frameworks KDE Platform

Functionality

See also

References