[cairo] Metafile

[Chris Wilson]

On Thu, 2009-01-22 at 10:08 +0800, David Trallero wrote:
> > does cairo has any metafiles (a way to record cairo commands and replay
> > it later)?
> 
> I am very interested in this. I am working on something that I call CSVG,
> (Cairo Scalar Vectorial Graphic), something like SVG but with Cairo functions.
> If there is something already done it will save me a lot of job.

Within git, there is a new tool called cairo-trace that generates
CairoScript output, which is based on PostScript but using native cairo
operators.

The primarily goals for CairoScript is to be a human-readable, dense
tracing format that can be replayed with low-overhead. The next stage in
its evolution is likely to investigate binary-encoding schemes that
should aide it as a transport protocol. A lower priority goal is to
investigate its suitability as an embedded graphics language, though at
the moment it's raison d'être is tracing.

One aspect of CairoScript that needs a little work is whether is
suitable as a meta-surface file format. I think the answer to that is a
resounding no, as the overhead of embedding the cairo-script-interpreter
within the library is significant compared to a simple binary format
that encapsulated the current meta-surface. That could be a trivial, but
very useful, topic for a SoC project...
-ickle