Dumping the rendering process in JavaFX

[Kevin Rushforth]

You could take a look at what JavaFX internally does for printing, which 
is similar to what you are trying to do. It also forces the J2D pipeline 
and had to deal with this issue. You likely won't be able to do it 
without modifying FX internals, though, which is what printing does in a 
few places.

-- Kevin


Herve Girod wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I think that more than one year ago, I asked if it was possible to dump the
> JavaFX rendering process. More than one year later, I (or we, for I am
> speaking on behalf of my project) are almost there. We use this in a
> library for a "JavaFX to any format you want" converter. For example we are
> currently able to convert a live JavaFX image to a PowerPoint slider (using
> POI), or we also could do the same with a WMF / EMF / SVG image, keeping
> the vector content of course.
>
> What we did is hacking the J2DPrismGraphics class to render it in a custom
> Graphics2D context which in turn can be a PPT / SVG / WMF / or EMF
> serializer.
>
> Our use case is the use of JavaFX in an Editor (no it's not a JavaFX
> Editor, we edit graphic specifications for an avionics standard called
> ARINC 661), and the ability to produce another Vector format with exactly
> the same UI.
>
> It works very well, except that of course we had to hack a few JavaFX core
> classes to do that (obviously J2DPrismGraphics was not designed to allow
> this). We did not recompile the core library, it's just separate classes
> which uses com.sun classes when possible, or we used PrivilegedActions when
> a method we needed was package protected.
>
> But we have still a big problem (I think that it might be the only one,
> except for the fact that our solution is an ugly hack, as you can see):
>
> There is still one case where our solution does not work: Textures. In fact
> we would have been able to convert JavaFX textures to BufferedImages if we
> could use the Java2D-based Texture class, but of course as we did nothing
> special, we encounter a D3D Texture (for example on Windows) which we don't
> know how to deal with.
>
> Which leads me to my two questions:
>
> - Is there a programmatic way (even a contorted one) to force JavaFX to use
> our own specific Pipeline (the idea is to be able to do this temporarily
> when serializing the JavaFX content, so without having to use command line
> argument)
>
> - I think that it could be very useful to have a neutral and JavaFX -
> supported way for developers to use their own Pipeline, even if it was
> limited and with a lower than average performance. Being able to convert
> from / to the JavaFX format is something that can be very useful.
>
> Hervé
>