[cairo] Notes on cairo/win32

[Owen Taylor]

On Wed, 2005-01-12 at 03:15 -0500, Jon Smirl wrote:
> My understanding of the MS plan is that DirectX is going to be their
> new base driver layer and GDI/GDI+ will be phased out over time. The
> drawing API will be the dotNet Avalon one. Of course this is going to
> take years to happen. Avalon is similar to Cairo and can print.
> 
> The shift from a GDI base to DirectX is parallel to the shift from X's
> XAA to X on GL. Basing things on DirectX/GL allows access to more
> hardware accelerated drawing functions, especially alpha blending.
> 
> DirectX 10 has spec'd hardware changes to accelerate drawing of alpha
> blended text with subpixel positioning and to increase the speed of
> drawing context switches.
> 
> The quick solution is to just use Glitz on OpenGL.

That might be the quick solution to getting Cairo demos up and running
in a window. But in the context of what we want to do for GTK+:

 - Use Cairo pervasively for all widgets and text in lots of windows
 - Mix Cairo with GDI rendering of themed widgets
 - Use Cairo for printing

I'm pretty skeptical about it being the right way to go short-term.
I think a GDI[+] backend will be useful in any case for printing and
for older Windows on older computers, so time spent working on one
won't be a loss even if OpenGL or Direct3D is how we get things hardware
accelerated.

Regards,
						Owen

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