On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 20:04 -0500, MenTaLguY wrote:
I wonder if it might not be worthwhile to write our PostScript to the "highest common denominator", then provide stub procedures so it gracefully degrades with less featureful interpreters?
OK, so not that I've actually managed to do anything useful at all in Inkscape development (yet), but perhaps I can come with a suggestion anyways: I have a feeling that if you actually want to move to a Cairo- based rendering solution it might not really be all that worthwhile to bother with advanced PostScript export at the moment. The PDF backend of Cairo can be expected to improve (currently it shows promise but doesn't really work for any advanced stuff as far as I can tell - it does already do transparency though, at least for flat colors!) and should probably be the preferred hardcopy output method. That way rendering to the screen, to an exported bitmap, and printing are all done with the same (Cairo) operations, minimizing the possibility of getting different results for different output formats.
Of course, the Cairo PostScript output is pretty much junk (as far as I know it still just shovels a huge bitmap onto each page) but there's talk about fixing that. Quality PDF generation might be higher priority though, since PDF 1.4 actually supports the stuff that you want to do, such as transparency... Also, won't the exotic interpreters that deal with transparency in PS also deal with PDF? I think e.g. some printers do.
Oh, by the way, if you do output PDF 1.4 you can then feed it to Ghostscript (using the pdf2ps utility) and watch it degrade more or less gracefully as is gets turned into PS. That's "PostScript" output while concentrating on PDF. ;)
Of course, I don't want to disparage anyone from doing cool stuff, I just have a sense that if anyone wants to put any major work into improving the export functionality, that work would probably be most efficiently spent on improving Cairo. That way all kinds of applications would stand to gain, as an added bonus.
Cheers, Per