MenTaLguY wrote:
Aaron Spike (and to a much lesser extent myself) have been working the cairo end of things, but Carl may still be the best person to give an estimate of how much more work is stil required. One of the most important things is getting push_group working right in Cairo-PDF -- right now it flat out rasterizes them, rather than creating PDF transparency groups with vectors.
So far I've only been working on getting my self acclimated so that I might be able to work on the cairo end of things. I wish I had more experience and expertise. And I wish I could promise good things with a reasonable timeline. But I'm only stepping in because I want this release to get out soon and I see a need that no one has been willing to fill as of yet.
In principle I think we could probably go ahead, since now that things are (mostly) fixed up on our side, the PDF export will get better as cairo gets better -- for Windows and autopackage at least, we could ship updates with updated cairo libs.
I plan to offer occasional development snapshot autopackages of cairo as I've been doing for inkscape. This should allow linux to run any inkscape against a new cairo (using LD_LIBRARY_PATH) without screwing with their distros cairo. It should also help us test PDF output as cairo improves. (Please note from now on all of our users will have cairo installed on their systems due to our requirement on gtk2.8. this is worth a separate thread.)
Aaron Spike