[cairo] Cairo and GdiPlus or two win32 backends

[Owen Taylor]

On Sat, 2005-01-15 at 23:20 +0100, Hans Breuer wrote:

> As there still seems to be no consensus if a Cairo/win32 backend
> should be implemented on top of GDI+ or GDI I've modified the GDI+
> backend to build side by side with my plain GDI backend.

I've been working over the last few days on redoing the font code so it
will be more friendly to native-Win32 fonts. Once that is done, my
thought was to start from scratch and write a win32 backend that:

 - Uses only GDI types in the interface (I don't see mixed
   GDI+/Cairo rendering as interesting, so there's no reason
   to constrain implementation in the API)

 - Implements pretty much everything with image fallbacks
   (text being partially an exception)

Accelerating solid rectangle fills and "over" alpha blends should be a
pretty trivial extension from there. I think that approachwill give
decent performance for on-screen rendering.

Getting good results for printing is going to be more work ... there's
some ideas in my last long mail.

I'll take another look at your patch before I start doing work on that;
it didn't really look quite like where I wanted to go in a brief look
earlier; I'm not quite sure how the use of windows metafiles fits in
with getting efficient to-screen rendering going. And I think it's
important to cover the full range of Cairo, and optimize from there
rather than starting from a subset and later filling in. But I may have
misunderstood it.

> Also the patch available since 2004-05-30 [1] - pending since
> about half a year [3] - is updated to cleanly apply to current
> cvs. See: http://hans.breuer.org/dia/cairo-2005-01-15-hb.diff
> 
> I still use msvc exclusively on windoze but from my experience it
> should be really simple to integrate this patch (at least the
> plain C/plain GDI part) with a mingw build - given that one
> understands the auto-magic at all.
> 
> Current limitations of the plain win32/GDI backend (and other
> backends as well as Cairo itself) are shown at my Dia/Cairo
> page http://hans.breuer.org/dia/dia-cairo.htm
> 
> In short the text rendering is still limited (glyphs rendered
> via Freetype/bitmaps) and no antialising at all. But my GDI
> backend shares some of these limitations with the PDF and
> - judging from the code - also the GdiPlus backend. Or the
> latter two don't do text at all yet.

The PDF backend is under heavy development, text support should land in
the next few days.

Regards,
					Owen

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/attachments/20050115/a7eb32bf/attachment.pgp