Cairo predecessor comparsion (continued, was Re: [cairo] Cairo and GdiPlus or two win32 backends)

[Carl Worth]

On Mon, 17 Jan 2005 00:38:23 +0100, Hans Breuer wrote:
> >   + probably has the nicest API (but IMHO only for application developers,
> >     not for Cairo backend implementaion)

I'm glad you are happy with the API. That's really the thing I've been
working hardest on to make good. We're well aware that the backend
interface could use some changes, and we're flexible to accept
them. David Reveman made a concrete proposal for reworking this not
too long ago.

> >   - does not support dashed bezier lines [3]

> > [3] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2004-May/001466.html

No change since then. This is an implementation bug, but not something
that has reached the top of the priority queue yet. If someone is
interested in tackling this, it shouldn't be too much new code, and
Keith or I could likely give some pointers.

> >   - cairo_surface_create_for_image() require a pixel format incompatible
> >     with gdk-pixbuf and also insist to keep the data allocated by the
> >     API user [3]

Owen's recently made noises about adding support for a gdk-pixbuf
compatible image format.

The data allocation thing with cairo_surface_create_for_image sounds
like just a bug. I've noted this in cairo/BUGS (and there are likely
several similar issues within the libpixman interface). I hadn't
noticed this from your earlier post since you hadn't specifically
mentioned cairo_surface_create_for_image, (and it seems most of my
tests use cairo_set_target_image instead).

>      - apparently quite a bunch of work still remains to be done (new
>        tesselator, pdf backend, PostScript which is not a huge bitmap,
>        integration with GDI, ...)

It sounds like a lot of fun to me. And almost all of these are being
actively worked on at the moment. (The new PostScript backend is
perhaps getting the least direct attention, except that we have
discussed it quite a bit and a metafile approach seems to be the
consensus. Given that, the current PDF backend may likely feed
directly into this effort).

Thanks for your feedback and patience.

-Carl
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