[cairo] RFC: duplicating, storing and serializing drawing operations

[Peter Weilbacher (Mozilla)]

Nicolas George wrote:

> But a picture is easier to read than a list of numbers, so it would be
> useful tu be able to write "lineto(x, y)" instead of printf. Unfortunately,
> there is no room for XNextEvent in such a program, and adding it would
> require a lot of work; often, much more work than writing the calculation
> itself. Instead, I often end up piping PostScript commands to gs, which
> lacks comfort.
[...]
> To do the link with what I was writing earlier, I can give an example
> implementation of the hypothetical library:
> 
> static FILE *plotter;
> 
> void init_graphics(void)
> {
>     plotter = popen("/usr/libexec/plotter_helper", "w");
> }
> 
> void lineto(double x, double y)
> {
>     fprintf(plotter, "lineto %f %f\n", x, y);
>     fflush(plotter);
> }

I cannot comment on how to do this with cairo or if it would be a good idea
to add capabilities like this into it.
But can you not just use a plotting program? I know that many people are doing
things like this using gnuplot (http://gnuplot.sf.net/) as a "library". With
that you can issue plot commands and also data via popen(), although the data
to plot is usually easier read from ASCII files.

    Peter.