On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 11:35:54 -0700, Carl Worth <cworth@...573...> wrote:
Is it not regressions in cairo itself that you're worried about but that the cairo-based PDF exporter is not as good as the old one?
Correct.
If so, what's the cairo-based exporter still missing? Anything we can fix in cairo itself?
The general problem people are complaining about right now is that it the cairo-based exporter rasterizes a lot of stuff that the old exporter didn't.
I think some of the issues (e.g. proper metasurface-based groups) are fixed in cairo trunk now, but I don't know if they've hit a release yet (and even if they have, there's no guarantee that, on Linux, the users/testers have a recent enough cairo installed to benefit).
I think two things we need to do at this point are:
1. get people reporting PDF problems to include their cairo version in the report (this may be something we should display in the about dialog)
2. find someone to assemble a test suite of cases we expect PDF export not to rasterize[1]
Since Linux distributions are going to lag behind in their cairo versions, we may still have to revert the PDF export for this release cycle no matter what gets fixed at this point. :/
-mental
[1] They'd do well to build on the test suite and feature comparison that I compiled for 0.45; it lives in SVN's doc/PDF\ Feature\ Matrix.*