I think this is a good idea and worth at least trying as a first step of a Cairo based Inkscape, assuming the Cairo PDF or Gnome-Print extensions now work okay. In my own experience, Cairo libsvg rendering works okay in c++ but it is not very fast compared to the current Inkscape canvas and maybe not as rendering complete as lib"r"svg (but I'm using an older version of Cairo). I believe the next version of Cairo is due out around 12/15 ? A totally Cairo based Inkscape would be nice but might depend on: a) development of a Cairo based drawing canvas b) the transition of the SVG surface from libsvg to librsvg c) speed increases in Cairo.
ps: I've knocked off some of the individual addresses on the mail, since I think they're on the list anyway.
Ted Gould wrote:
On Fri, 2005-12-02 at 15:06 -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote:
Carl also mentioned something called Poppler(?) which does PDF _import_, that works in conjunction with Cairo, and that would give us a good round-trip to and from PDF. This sounds worth checking out.
I thought I read somewhere that there was an SVG backend to Cairo... that'd probably work the best :)
Also, since there is a SVG backend to GNOME-Print, and Evince uses gnome-print, we should be able to work out something with them to get decent PDF import. I think the biggest difficultly will be handing multiple pages... we need to figure out how we want to handle that in Inkscape in general.
--Ted