[cairo] Fast text rendering

[Jonathan Morton]

On Tue, 2010-07-13 at 09:45 -0700, Bill Spitzak wrote:
> > It looks like these are almost all numbers or number pairs. Have you
> > tried various caching ideas such as
> >   - saving and reusing 10 digit or 100 digit-pair paths and just filling
> >   - pre-rendering 10 digit or 100 digit-pair images and just compositing
> 
> There really should be no excuse for such stuff to perform better than
> Cairo's glyph caching!

Pre-rendered images should always be the fastest way of doing things,
though they might not always be appropriate.

It looks to me as though this "xgl" backend has some big performance
problems with the way it's being used by the font renderer.  In this
case, I would expect pre-rendered images to be faster.  If the stated
performance can't be reached with pre-rendered images, I would recommend
using a different backend!

-- 
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From: Jonathan Morton
      jonathan.morton at movial.com