[Cairo] Color transforms

[Owen Taylor]

On Thu, 2003-07-17 at 00:35, Keith Packard wrote:
> Around 0 o'clock on Jul 17, Trevor Woerner wrote:
> 
> > IMHO, if multi-platform is what everyone wants, it would be slightly 
> > better to have less functionality but be consistent with the API and 
> > capabilities, than to have the potential of some capabilities on some 
> > systems but not on others.
> 
> Every system can support raster images, so there's no reason to consider 
> limited functionality anywhere; we can always dump images.  That's going 
> to be necessary for PostScript in any case as it doesn't support 
> translucency.  Other systems recognize when the output cannot be generated 
> with higher level primitives and fall back to rasterization automatically, 
> I think we can manage the same in cairo.
> 
> Device-independent should mean that the API have no limitations caused by 
> the rasterization engine for a particular device, but we will still need 
> some media-specific functionality (like 'showpage').  Getting a PS driver 
> running is a high priority mostly to make sure the API works for printing, 
> not to make sure we can generate postscript (that's the easy part).

I would suggest that you should try to work the API so that the printing
API isn't glommed into the rendering API, but forms a separate layer;
that is, instead of cairo_showpage (context), have something more along
the lines of:

 print_job = cairo_print_job_new_file (filename);
 cairo_print_job_set_context (print_job, context);
 /* draw a page onto context */
 cairo_print_job_next_page (print_job);
 
Or whatever. If it's set up this way, then you don't have to worry about
having lots of methods that only apply for some output devices.

Regards,
					Owen