[cairo] Re: [Inkscape-devel] NEW: cairo rendering in outline mode

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 25, 2007, at 10:10, bulia byak wrote:

> When drawing into a memory buffer, cairo uses a fixed byte order of
> the R, G, B, A bytes regardless of the platform.
>
> Inkscape and GDK (which is used by Inkscape for drawing to screen),
> however, both use system-dependent byte order, i.e. the order of R, G,
> B, A is determined by the hardware and is different on PC and Mac
> platforms.
>
> And it so happens that the fixed order of cairo coincides with the
> hardware order on PC but not on Mac. Hence, painting by cairo directly
> into Inkscape/GDK buffers worked on PC but on Mac, all colors are
> wrong and (in case of outline) black color gets zero opacity, i.e.
> becomes invisible.
>
> Essentially, this means that Inkscape and cairo are not compatible as
> is, and that a gradual switching of parts of our display engine to
> cairo is not possible. (Unless we ditch Macs, of course.)

[snip]

You keep saying "Macs" but I assume you mean PowerPC-based Macs,  
since we are talking about an endian issue here and Intel and PowerPC  
processors use different endianness, and most PCs use Intel (or  
compatible) processors. I would assume that the above-mentioned  
problems do not exist, and that Inkspace/Cairo works properly, on  
Intel-based Macintosh computers? Has this been tested?