[cairo] PDF lib?

[Rui Tiago Matos]

Yes, you answered my questions, thank you.

I have been thinking for a while that a PDF renderer library would be
a good project to host at fd.org. Right now, in free desktops, the PDF
readers that exist are suboptimal being based either on ghostscript or
xpdf (which renders quite ugly fonts btw). There has been some
advances on this field as you can see with kpdf (being the best right
now even if in beta) and evince, but they are still based on xpdf and
working in parallel on a feature I think should be standard on any
desktop, thus a common library should exist.

Now about quartz let me say I don't know much about it either, I found
that page when researching a bit for my mail. Anyway it seems quite a
good model that cairo should follow, if it wasn't following it already
without knowing, that is.


On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 08:56:26 -0500, Carl Worth <cworth at cworth.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Feb 2005 03:32:23 +0000, Rui Tiago Matos wrote:
> > I realise that cairo is supposed to write PDF files. But what about
> > reading them and display them on screen?
> 
> The cairo library itself doesn't provide this functionality directly,
> but it does make it quite easy to build such a thing on top of
> cairo. This keeps parsing code for many formats, (PDF, SVG, etc.),
> outside of the core library which is focused on drawing.
> 
> And Alexander Larsson has an application in progress that does exactly
> that. It's a port of xpdf made to render everything with cairo. It's
> called xpdf-cairo and can be found in the xpdf-cairo module in CVS:
> 
> You may browse the source here:
> 
>         http://cvs.cairographics.org/xpdf-cairo/
> 
> Or check it out with a command like:
> 
>         cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs at cairographics.org:/cvs/cairo co xpdf-cairo
> 
> I could imagine that it might be useful to have PDF rendering made
> available in a library rather than just a standalone program. This
> would be similar to the SVG rendering library libsvg-cairo that
> already exists. Alex might have some ideas on how suitable the
> xpdf-cairo code would be for such a library.
> 
> > Is cairo's goal to be a framework similar to what apple's quartz[1] is?
> 
> I do not have any goal for cairo to be like quartz. With cairo, we've
> started with experience with the PostScript imaging model and our own
> ideas for what kind of interface programmers will find most compelling,
> and we've been building up from scratch from there.
> 
> > [1] http://developer.apple.com/documentation/GraphicsImaging/Reference/CGAPI-title.html
> 
> That said, I hadn't ever looked at that web page before, but from
> reading just the opening paragraph, it's clear that cairo and quartz
> share some similar goals:
> 
>         "advanced, two-dimensional drawing engine"
>         "API is easy to use"
>         "Bezier curves, path-based drawing, transparency,...,antialiasing"
>         "PDF generation"
> 
> And there are a couple of things in that list that I recognize as
> important to be enabled by cairo, but that I believe are best
> implemented in other layers than libcairo:
> 
>         "advanced color management"
>         "PDF playback"
> 
> I hope that helps answer some of your questions.
> 
> -Carl
> 
>