bulia byak wrote:
On 2/21/06, Aaron Spike <aaron@...749...> wrote:
- Replace all strokes with paths
- Decompose all overlapping objects (this would be an additional
boolean op, and it has been requested twice in my recent memory) 3) Replace all area's of overlapping transparency with a bitmap copy. 4) Replace all non overlapping transparency with the resultant color.
I can only repeat my strong conviction that implementing transparency via PDF 1.4 is several orders of magniture simpler, not to mention more practical. The demand for transparency in PS is only going to decrease with time.
Not to mention the really abominable (IMHO) unnaturalness and baroqueness of the above approach. Many times I have cursed when Xara created a (unusable for me) Postscript with embedded bitmaps, due to some apparent overlooked bits of transparency in the source drawing. Given the bugginess of our boolean ops and the many unfixed bugs even in the current PS export, I really think our effects could be better spent.
Seems that both Xara and Adobe are giving credibility to the really abominable unnaturalness and baroqueness of this approach. ;-)
I agree that it is unnatural and I too would prefer a PDF 1.4+ solution. But support for PDF 1.3- is going to remain pertinent for a much longer time than we would like. There has got to be hosts of application that still support only the opaque drawing mode.
And if anyone in the OSS community is going to affect such a gnarly solution, it would be easiest for us because we have the infrastructure.
Don't worry. This was just an observation not a call to action. I'm still exploring and educating myself.
Latest observation, rsvg-convert uses cairo to generate pdfs, but they are fully rasterized, though from skimming through the pdf surface source in cairo cvs it would appear they have code to write pdf drawing operations.
Aaron Spike