[cairo] Cairo and Inkscape

[Joshua A. Andler]

Hey there Cairo crew!

I just wanted to follow up on the bugs that have prevented bulia from
switching Inkscape's main renderer to Cairo. He had emailed the list
initially about 6 months ago, and there hadn't been any recent
discussion, so it seemed like it couldn't hurt to bring the topic up again.

Unfortunately I don't personally have much knowledge about the bugs or
their causes, but if I'm lucky, either cworth or bulia byak will help
out with that information.

I know that a couple issues were spurious lines when zooming in on our
canvas, and also a mask related issue. I believe there were 4 in all, 2
or 3 of which were show stoppers for us.

Behdad recommended that I contact Soeren Sandmann regarding the
stride-is-multiple-of-4-bug, so you got cc'd too. ;)

I don't want to nag about this, but I've personally started hitting a
wall with inkscape and feel especially bad for the folk who use it on
hardware with less resources. For the record, I mainly do illustration
work and I'm always stress testing inkscape.

Unfortunately the memory consumption is getting out of control, and in
Bulia's testing, inkscape was using half the memory when Cairo was used.
There are other performance issues Inkscape has, but this is number one
on the list for the average user (and something I've heard many
complaints about on deviantART when I evangelize for Inkscape there).

So, if need be, I will put my money where my mouth is and offer
bounties. I'd also be willing to do art in exchange for the bug fixes too.

Even if no one is currently interested in pursuing these bugs, I still
want to say thank you to all the Cairo developers and contributors for
making my desktop and application usage a MUCH better experience. :)

For note, if you're interested in the most recent illustration which has
made Inkscape's memory usage beyond painful (and you'll probably need to
click the image to enlarge):

http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/61540472/

The above piece murders my 3ghz machine with 2gigs of ram even (it's
100% vector done in inkscape)... also note that there was a completely
unrelated inkscape bug which is preventing me from exporting that file
(as it crashes), so the less than stellar (as in a bunch of issues
compared to inkscape) rasterization was done via GIMP. So please be
gentle with pointing out the flaws... they're really all introduced in
GIMP's rasterization. ;)

Cheers,
Josh