[cairo] Cairo and SVG

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-12-21 22:33+0100 Emmanuel Pacaud wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Le vendredi 21 décembre 2007 à 12:37 -0800, Alan W. Irwin a écrit :
>> Note, it appears that SVG backend (I hope I am using the correct terminology
>> here) is not nearly as well supported as the PS, PDF, PNG, and X backends.
>
> The SVG backend is officialy supported and passes the test suite. Please
> report any bug you may have.

Further investigation done just now while attempting to prepare a proper bug
report confirmed the lack of SVG text problem for the ImageMagick display
programme on my current Debian testing platform.  Thus, this result confirms
what I and other PLplot developers had seen previously on other platforms.
However, I looked further and discovered both konqueror and iceweasel
(firefox) for Debian testing show the text! So it appears now there has been
a long-standing incompatibility between the ImageMagick display programme
and cairo-derived SVG results.

If someone here can confirm that incompatibility using the SVG results
produced directly by your test suite, than I leave it to you to figure out
whether the issue is due to a bug in the "display" command or is that
command being more careful about SVG standards than konqueror, iceweasel,
and the SVG backend of libcairo?

I have just had a report that svgcairo results show no text with a Mac OS X
SVG viewer so that is another example of a viewer that is either buggy or
being extra careful about SVG standards. I will follow up with the reporter
to find out exactly which viewer he used, but I doubt it was "display".

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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