[cairo] Cairo and SVG

[Alan W. Irwin]

On 2007-12-24 12:00-0800 Alan W. Irwin wrote:

> On 2007-12-24 10:33+0100 Emmanuel Pacaud wrote:
>
>> I have concrete evidence that Inkscape, librsvg, mozilla and batik
>> display correctly the text in the SVG files produced byt he cairo SVG
>> backend.
>>
>> Imagemagick display command doesn't. And fails to render the following
>> test:
>>
>> http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/Test/20061213/htmlObjectHarness/full-struct-symbol-01-b.html
>
> Thanks for that additional information.  I will fill in the appropriate bug
> reports (Debian and possibly upstream) for ImageMagick since until this bug
> is fixed a lot of users will try ImageMagick (which is normally reliable
> since it has such a huge userbase) and wrongfully conclude there is
> something wrong with the SVG backend to libcairo.

It turns out that both Debian testing and unstable have really old versions
of imagemagick (package version 7:6.2.4.5.dfsg1-2).  In fact, there is a 
Debian bug request for the package maintainer to abdicate because the
package is so unmaintained and out of date.

Here is the complete version information.

irwin at raven> display -version
Version: ImageMagick 6.2.4 09/30/07 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2005 ImageMagick Studio LLC

I just downloaded and built the latest version (ImageMagick-6.3.7).  One of
the configuration options was

RSVG              --with-rsvg=yes               yes

so it apparently uses the same SVG library that works for other applications.

Here is the complete version information:

software at raven> install/bin/display -version
Version: ImageMagick 6.3.7 12/24/07 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2008 ImageMagick Studio LLC

That copyright date is definitely getting ahead of itself, but still this
version is probably something like two years later than the Debian unstable
(!) version.

This modern "display" command shows the text for svgcairo results (as
expected from its use of librsvg). So that resolves all issues I brought up
originally (assuming users have a properly configured modern ImageMagick)
with the exception of the firefox on OS X one.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of
Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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