[SURVEY] Should y=0 be at the top or bottom of the document?

[Gregory Brown]

Hi folks,

I never thought I'd see the day, but we're considering the possibility
of swapping the y axis so that 0 is at the top of the document.
While we won't make a decision directly based off of this survey, it
surely will help us make a more educated decision. To limit the
population a bit, we're asking that only existing contributors
register a vote. (But there are a lot of those, maybe 50 or so by
now)

So... if you have a patch (large or small) that has been accepted into
any of prawn-core, prawn-layout, prawn-security, or prawn-format,
please respond with a link to a commit on github for authentication,
and the following number based on your choice:

Do you think that we should change Prawn's coordinate system so that
y=0 is at the top of the document?

-2: No, I'd hate that.
-1: It would have been nice early on, but it's too late now.
+0: no preference
+1: It would be nice, but not that important
+2: Yes, definitely

I will respond now with my vote, which can be used as an example for
further responses. Please don't post discussion to this thread,
start another one if you want to discuss anything related to this.

[Gregory Brown]

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 10:32 AM, Gregory Brown
<gregory...@gmail.com> wrote:

> Do you think that we should change Prawn's coordinate system so that
> y=0 is at the top of the document?

-2: No, I'd hate that.

http://github.com/sandal/prawn/commit/722604019a24f0961dcff5d65206ded5f8fab778

[Daniel Nelson]

> Do you think that we should change Prawn's coordinate system so that
> y=0 is at the top of the document?

+0: no preference

http://github.com/sandal/prawn/commit/6da307a86c43dfecf48c3105a1f4c39b380f3dd6

[Brad Ediger]

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 9:32 AM, Gregory Brown <gregory...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you think that we should change Prawn's coordinate system so that
> y=0 is at the top of the document?

-1: It would have been nice early on, but it's too late now.

http://github.com/madriska/prawn-security/commit/7dd4b64a36072bc67094e26299bff04d091b0631

[Henrik Nyh]

On Sat, Dec 5, 2009 at 16:32, Gregory Brown <gregory...@gmail.com> wrote:
> So... if you have a patch (large or small) that has been accepted into
> any of prawn-core, prawn-layout, prawn-security, or prawn-format,
> please respond with a link to a commit on github for authentication,
> and the following number based on your choice:
>
> Do you think that we should change Prawn's coordinate system so that
> y=0 is at the top of the document?
>
> -2: No, I'd hate that.
> -1: It would have been nice early on, but it's too late now.
> +0: no preference
> +1: It would be nice, but not that important
> +2: Yes, definitely

http://github.com/sandal/prawn/commit/bd3c9dd4e48686489cac1145caf78a9d4e15c285

+1

[Sam LG]

This will betray my ignorance of the PDF format, but: how about a +/-3
option for "whatever PDF uses"? (=

Personally, I'm used to 0 at the top [and I've already had to write a
function converting my y-coordinates to Prawn's], so:

> +1: It would be nice, but not that important

-Sam

[Sam LG]

Whoops, forgot: http://github.com/sandal/prawn/commit/37aad57928c81c0cceb0c0d0c4431d77186434e8

[Chris Schumann]

http://github.com/torgoton/prawn/commit/49f2ee8d35203fc3de8c72a1a1f4e9f8cdffdcb3

My gut answer:
+2: Yes, definitely

Discussion elsewhere.

[Gunnar Wolf]

Gregory Brown dijo [Sat, Dec 05, 2009 at 10:32:02AM -0500]:

> Do you think that we should change Prawn's coordinate system so that
> y=0 is at the top of the document?
>
> -2: No, I'd hate that.
> -1: It would have been nice early on, but it's too late now.
> +0: no preference
> +1: It would be nice, but not that important
> +2: Yes, definitely

-1: It would have been nice early on, but it's too late now.

I'd hate to go over all of my code changing the logic to what would
seem natural - including the places where I reverse the logic ;-)

--
Gunnar Wolf • gw...@gwolf.org • (+52-55)5623-0154 / 1451-2244

[Gunnar Wolf]

Gunnar Wolf dijo [Sun, Dec 06, 2009 at 10:46:07AM -0600]:

> -1: It would have been nice early on, but it's too late now.
>
> I'd hate to go over all of my code changing the logic to what would
> seem natural - including the places where I reverse the logic ;-)

Of course, I have no say as I have no patches, sorry for the noise. I
am packaging Prawn for Debian, but that's not _in_ prawn. So feel free
to ignore me.

[Peter Seebach]

In message <b37300880912050732r425...@mail.gmail.com>, Grego

ry Brown writes:
>I never thought I'd see the day, but we're considering the possibility
>of swapping the y axis so that 0 is at the top of the document.

Please yes.

>So... if you have a patch (large or small) that has been accepted into
>any of prawn-core, prawn-layout, prawn-security, or prawn-format,
>please respond with a link to a commit on github for authentication,
>and the following number based on your choice:

I don't think I've done that; all I've done is submit a couple of
patches through the tracker. But you can see my patches (one of which fixes
the indent() function to work with column boxes, which I figure counts for
something) on the tracker.

>Do you think that we should change Prawn's coordinate system so that
>y=0 is at the top of the document?

I'd go with +2 yes.

Here's why: Stretchy bounding boxes.

In a stretchy bounding box, any time you add text, pdf.cursor == 0. This
makes it USELESS to, say, record the current cursor value, then try to move
back to it later.

Basically, y should grow in the same direction that stretchy boxes do, and
I'm pretty sure that stretchy boxes should grow down.

-s

[James Healy]

Sam LG wrote:
> This will betray my ignorance of the PDF format, but: how about a +/-3
> option for "whatever PDF uses"? (=

By default, PDF has the origin in the bottom left which is why prawn has
the same. It involved less code when the project was bootstrapped.

-- James Healy <ji...@deefa.com> Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:37:29 +1100

[James Healy]

Gregory Brown wrote:
> Do you think that we should change Prawn's coordinate system so that
> y=0 is at the top of the document?
>
> -2: No, I'd hate that.
> -1: It would have been nice early on, but it's too late now.
> +0: no preference
> +1: It would be nice, but not that important
> +2: Yes, definitely
>
> I will respond now with my vote, which can be used as an example for
> further responses. Please don't post discussion to this thread,
> start another one if you want to discuss anything related to this.

-1: It would have been nice early on, but it's too late now.

http://github.com/sandal/prawn/commit/a1c0c2874d84c13157e6aa6326603d7c5299f5cc

-- James Healy <ji...@deefa.com> Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:41:26 +1100