MenTaLguY wrote:
On Thu, 2007-08-09 at 18:22 -0300, bulia byak wrote:
Try viewing the same page in outline mode. Note the memory difference. That's, more or less, what you will get in regular mode too once it's switched to cairo - at least for flat colors. It will likely be slower for gradients (don't know by how much), and it will be about as slow as now for blur because we still do blur ourselves. But still this should give you an idea.
If it proves advantageous, we should still be able to use our current gradient renderer with cairo. IIRC, it has some additional nicities over cairo's, including dithering to minimize the appearance of banding.
Actually I don't think that's the case. I looked into gradient rendering a while ago (and double-checked just now) and I don't see anything that (at least obviously) takes care of dithering. I in fact experimented with adding dithering. And I believe I concluded that it would eventually not be worth it, mostly because of degraded performance and enlarged file size when exporting. It would probably be better to make it possible to render to 16 bits per pixel per color (and optionally dither to 8 bits afterwards), also because I seem to remember that images could get a bit noisy when semi-transparent layers of dithered gradients were composited (but I'm not 100% sure about that, it was a while ago).