Re: [xmlroff] Cairo as the backend for xmlroff?

[Tony G. <Ton...@Su...>]

Dave Malcolm <da...@da...> wrote at Fri, 12 Mar 2004 15:14:05 +0000:
> On Fri, 2004-03-12 at 01:41, Dave Malcolm wrote:
> > I've been having a look at xmlroff and libfo after a long break.  It
> > struck me that there's a lot in common between the FoDoc subclasses and
> > a Cairo context.
> > 
> > See http://cairographics.org/
> > 
> > There's currently a fair amount of momentum behind the Cairo project (it
> > has the author of Pango and of the X Render extension on board) - so it

That explains the reference to Cairo in my Pango feature request for
Pango to have a GNOME Print context.

> > might be worth supporting a FoDocCairo backend.  Is it worth me
> > attempting a patch?
> 
> Alas, looking deeper, I'm not sure I'd be able to achieve much more than
> sending the pages as a series of fully composited pixbufs to the
> printer/PDF - not necessarily very useful.

Yeah, it was an eye-opener to see the generated PostScript being just
one bitmap per page.

That will be even less useful once they get to generating PDF.

> Probably worth keeping an eye on, though.

True, especially if they make it possible to get a vector view, not
just a raster.

Regards,


Tony Graham
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Web Products, Technologies and Standards           Phone: +353 1 8199708
Sun Microsystems                                              x(70)19708
East Point Business Park, Dublin 3, Ireland