On Fri, 24 Mar 2006 00:05:58 -0400, "bulia byak" <buliabyak@...400...> wrote:
On 3/23/06, MenTaLguY <mental@...3...> wrote:
- Xara provides a lot of stuff that we would otherwise have to write
ourselves atop Cairo (e.g. gaussian blur)
Are you sure Cairo has/will have no blur? I heard it's committed to supporting everyhing that's in SVG, and this is a standard SVG filter.
Cairo implements a simple rendering model which happens to overlap with a subset of SVG's rendering model (both loosely patterned after PDF's model).
I did understand that Carl and company are interested in making it generally suited to rendering SVG (and it is), but my understanding was also that stuff like image processing (i.e. SVG filters) was outside its scope. I'll double-check on the Cairo list, though.
- Xara is considerably faster
But if Cairo gets Xara renderer, it will be just as fast.
True, although that's not a given yet. Cairo isn't GPLed, after all, so they would have to negotiate the release of the code under the (significantly more liberal) Cairo license.
Anyway, the Cairo API would expose only a subset of the needed functionality. IIRC I had a discussion with Xara folks on this list a while back, and they indicated one of the difficulties would be that Cairo's API only allows for expressing a subset of what they need.
At minimum, the Xara code would have to be split into pieces: one "below" Cairo, as a Cairo backend, and one "above" Cairo, built on top of it.
Anyway, so far it's premature, since Xara's renderer is the part which is not opensourced yet (it remains a binary lib in their source tarball).
Ahh... I hadn't looked at that yet, honestly. But, like I said, this would be in the post-0.44/0.45 timeframe anyway. Hopefully that would be sorted out by then.
-mental