On Wed, 17 Nov 2004, Bob Jamison wrote:
By the way, Carl Worth is looking for some assistance in updating his SVG->Cairo renderer. Maybe something like our SPObject/Repr trees would do the trick. It would be a good way to contribute back to Freedesktop.org, and also an opportunity to refactor our design.
For a simple renderer, something like the SPObject/SPRepr split is likely to be severe overkill.
It only becomes useful when you want to e.g. also implement DOM (somewhat useful), or when you want to roundtrip the underlying XML document without mangling it (very useful).
It'd be really nice to get Carl involved sometime soon, though. Among other things, I've been internally kicking around some ideas about retained-mode rendering APIs that would be nice to discuss with him (Hi Carl).
Ideally, it'd be nice if we could eventually (in a year or two) break the Inkscape rendering stuff entirely into another project to focus on editing and UI features in the main codebase.
-mental