Re: [Plplot-devel] Cairo / Pango

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

On 2007-03-26 20:59-0400 Hazen Babcock wrote:

>
> Hello,
>
> With the Cairo library (http://www.cairographics.org/manual/) it is
> possible to make a driver similar to that built on the GD library
> that would handle at least the following forms of output (all
> truetype & anti-aliased):
>
> 1. X Windows (this currently exists using Cairo as xwinttf).
> 2. Postscript
> 3. PDF
> 4. SVG
> 5. PNG
> 6. Memory
> 7. Win32
>
> Clearly these are all redundant to varying degrees with various
> currently existing drivers (psttf, pdf, svg, gd, mem, wingcc),
> although (5) and (6) as I understand it do not support anti-aliasing.
> Since it isn't too hard to do, I'm inclined to go ahead and add this
> redundancy. Thoughts?

That's an excellent idea, and please go ahead and implement it.

> Suggestions for driver names? c-pdf? cl-pdf?

If a choice between hyphen and underscore to separate I prefer the
underscore because, e.g, "-dev c_pdf" is less confusing that "-dev c-pdf" as
a command-line option.  Another possibility is to separate by
capitalization, e.g,

pdfCairo

I sort of like Cairo at the end (or I guess pdf_c is another possibility) to
remind me that this pdf, png, etc., device depends on the Cairo library.
However, I am the first to admit I have trouble picking good names.  Thus,
you get to choose from all the possibilities since you are the author... :-)

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation
for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org); the Yorick front-end to PLplot (yplot.sf.net); the
Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project
(lbproject.sf.net).
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Linux-powered Science
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