On Fri, 24 Mar 2006 21:07:29 +0200, "Juha Varkki" <admin@...1218...> wrote:
Hey,
Have you ever considered using AGG as the rendering engine in Inkscape? AGG (AntiGrain Geometry, http://www.antigrain.com/) is a very high quality and fast C++ 2D graphics engine and there's even an SVG renderer based on it (http://www.antigrain.com/svg/index.html).
We've considered it in the past. One disadvantage it has relative to Cairo is that its architecture doesn't appear to easily permit hardware acceleration, which is going to become more important in the future. A related advantage is that (as others have pointed out) the pluggable backends allow Cairo to output Postscript and PDF directly.
From a performance standpoint, generally when people are benchmarking Cairo, they are benchmarking its software backend, which is (from what I've seen of the code) pretty horribly unoptimized. So, while I'd be reluctant to use AGG directly, it might be an interesting exercise to write an AGG backend for Cairo...
-mental