[cairo] Sponsoring / paying for new features in Cairo

[Christoph Lindemann]

(sorry if this is a duplicates, but it did not look like the first mail
ever arrived)

As we are looking into using Cairo in one of our projects, we would like
to sponsor/pay for some new features.

So the questions:
-are there any official ways to sponsor development of Cairo? 
-maybe there are some other projects, which use Cairo, which support
sponsoring?
-any companies that are specialized in Cairo or have the needed Cairo
knowledge, which could be employed to do the implementation?
-other ideas about this mater?

The project for which we would like to use Cairo, does print job stream
conversion. We would like to use the Cairo API as the abstraction layer
between different stream format plug-ins. New output formats could then
be implemented as new Cairo back ends.
One example could be conversion of PDF to SVG Print. However, Cairo
lacks support for some feature, especially text output, as we would like
to get "high level" output, to maintain as much information from the
original as possible, and only fall back to bitmap as a last resort.

So there are several things which would need to be implemented or
improved. This list is not complete, but more a collection of ideas:
-Text support (I think this is worked on with PDF?) 
-SVG-Print support 
-plug-able back ends. So it would be possible to plug-in a backend
"driver" at runtime, without the need to recompile 
-Improved GDI backend, which also could implement EMF conversion 
-XPS support (although I prefer SVG-Print) 
-plug-able "front-end" support. a standard input layer for Cairo

This could also be implemented as a new public project, a Cairo based
conversion framework. Because some of the stuff might be out of Cairo's
scope.

I would appreciate any suggestion, thoughts, ideas, comments...

Best Regards,
Christoph Lindemann

________________________________

Print Associates A/S
Christoph Lindemann
Lyngby Hovedgade 4, 3. Sal
2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark