[cairo] Drawing points?

[Ian Britten]

Carl Worth wrote:
 >> Is there a recommended way of drawing points with Cairo?

 > If that idiom seems odd, here's another:
 >
 >     cairo_move_to (cr, x, y);
 >     cairo_line_to (cr, x, y);
 >     /* repeat for each point */
 >
 >     cairo_stroke (cr);

That's what we ended up trying ...

 > Within the implementation (and test suite) we call these "degenerate"
 > paths and we explicitly support drawing round caps for such degenerate
 > paths. So this should work perfectly for the case of
 > CAIRO_LINE_CAP_ROUND and you'll get the diameter controlled by
 > cairo_set_line_width just like you want.

Yep, we found that to be the case.  :)

 > However, I believe that we have specified that degenerate paths do not
 > draw anything in the case of CAIRO_LINE_CAP_SQUARE. The problem their is
 > that there's ambiguity as to what direction the square caps should be
 > drawn in. (Contrast this with the case of stroking a dashed line with
 > square caps and a dash pattern with a zero-length "on" section. In that
 > case, we do have direction information and we do draw the caps.)

Yep, we had also run into this, and I was just getting ready to ask
about the apparent bug/inconsistency.
Do you think the possible ambiguity justifies not drawing anything
at all (which seems to be the current behaviour), as opposed to
drawing something (At some documented orientation)?

 > It might be desirable to draw axis-aligned squares in the case of
 > stroking degenerate paths with square caps, and one could argue that
 > this is what cairo should do. But so far we've opted not to do that.
 >
 > I'd definitely be open for more opinions on this. It's good for us to
 > strengthen our rationale for various decisions. And obviously we need to
 > document some of these idioms more completely.

I'd vote for that.  I suspect an axis-aligned box would be a
sane/traditional default (dating back to earlier graphics systems),
and would be what I would have assumed Cairo would do.

Otherwise, I guess I'm left to calculate+position+draw an appropriate
square myself, eh?

Many thanks for the explanation (And for any enhancements!  ;) )
Ian