Re: [Rdkit-devel] Chem/Draw code: new feature and some refactoring

[Greg L. <gre...@gm...>]

Dear Uwe,

On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 12:51 PM, Uwe Hoffmann <uw...@fa...> wrote:
>
> just some idea: what about removing sping and agg altogether ?
> The code will be simpler and bug reports also, because it's clear
> which backend is used.
> Questions:
> 1) I don't know if there is a feature/backend which isn't supported
>   by cairo ?
> 2) Is the cairo quality sufficient (cairo itself , not the actual
>   implementation in rdkit)?
> 3) speed (when used for many images)

Cairo is a great toolkit for drawing, and the backend you did is
perfectly capable. For systems that have cairo installed, it's almost
definitely the best choice to use. However, due to its dependency on
GTK Cairo is not easy to build and install. For systems that don't
have a cairo installation (for example, almost every machine I work
on), the aggdraw canvas provides a high-quality alternative for
generating raster images. The sping-based canvas is provided as a
lowest-common denominator, pure-python, solution to allow images to be
generated from the RDKit out-of-the-box (it also has the advantage of
being able to generate pdf and svg, which aggdraw cannot).

Best Regards,
-greg