[cairo] 64 bit fixed point in Cairo?

[Bill Spitzak]

Ideally Cairo should transform floating point to the final coordinates, 
then correctly clip off graphics that are outside the output surface 
(which is assumed to be smaller than 2^24). Then it can do all the rest 
of it's work in 24.8 numbers, perhaps pushing all this decisions into 
the back ends.

It is not doing this now but I think that is the correct solution. It 
means the transformation matrix has to be floating point (though there 
could be flags to indicate what parts are different than the identity, 
and the translation component could be split into a 24.8 addition if 
this will keep the xy offsets in the matrix zero.

You should be warned that if you zoom way in on a location that is far 
from the origin, you will see serious artifacts due to the low 
resolution of large floating point numbers. You may want to rethink your 
source data into a hierarchy, so that for each "object" coordinates are 
close to zero and the object is parented to a translation that moves it 
to closest floating point value in absolute space. This would also allow 
you to avoid Cairo's bugs by setting it only to the difference between 
the whole-scene translation and the local object translation before drawing.

Nicholas Allen wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> We have an application that has its own widget framework that uses cairo
> to render its graphics. We are noticing graphical glitches and mistakes
> when we pass large coordinates to cairo's functions (values in the range
> of around 8 million). These large coordinates occur because we have a
> scroller widget that contains a very large widget that the user can
> scroll around. The user can zoom in and out of this widget so the widget
> can easily get to much more than 8 million pixels wide. Ideally we would
> like to support values upto around 1 << 50 (so 8 million is a extremely
> low limit for us). When the widget being scrolled is painted we
> translate by its position inside the scroller and then clip using the
> widget's bounds and then the widget paints itself.
>