[cairo] Call for unresolved issues (and planning for 1.4)

[Carl Worth]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2007 12:48:58 -0800, Bill Spitzak wrote:
> Any chance of looking into the change so that stroke width, font, dash,
> etc are all fixed in device space at the moment they are set, and not
> effected by further transforms? I forgot what you called this but it
> certainly was discussed before.

I don't think I'll have any time to look into this.

We did talk a lot about this just before 1.2.0 since I had been hoping
to get that change done before then. At the time I actually did a fair
amount of work writing/testing a patch for this, but ended up
rejecting it before 1.2. I'd have to dig through the mail archives to
remember the details.

Some of the things I _think_ we ran into were, (without digging
through the archives right now):

1. Uncertainty about how much damage this compatibility break would
   cause, (at the very least, I think we'd need to make the change
   very early in a development series rather than late so that we
   could have some hope of getting it tested).

2. Complications of things like cairo_get_line_width which would need
   to be updated to return a description of an ellipse rather than a
   single scalar value.

3. The problem that PostScript and PDF do not natively support the
   behavior, so stroking code that relied on this would not result in
   native PostScript/PDF strokes. (If we could write it to still do a
   native fill that would be acceptable---but if it triggered
   rasterization---and particularly, the current full-page
   rasterization, then that would be unacceptable).

So there's definitely a fair amount of work here.

I'm still quite interested in this---I think the current semantics for
cairo_set_line_width are an annoying inconsistency and quite likely a
mistake. But there's all the above that would have to be taken care of
by someone who wants to make this happen.

-Carl
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