Hi all,
I talked with Carl a bit more today about the PDF functionality with Cairo and what it'd take to use it with Inkscape. Here's some additional info. Carl, correct me if I've captured any of this wrong.
Some clarification on libsvg, when Carl said he wasn't supporting it, I interpreted this to mean it needed another maintainer. He clarified this; the reasons he had forked libsvg from librsvg originally was to try out replacing its libart backend with a cairo backend. Now that librsvg uses cairo as it's back end, there's no reason for libsvg to be used, and in fact it lacks capabilities that are in librsvg.
So... The plan going forward would be this. svg2pdf as it exists now is probably ok for a start; it's at least better than we got now, and fits within our existing system. I think it's mainly going to be a packaging issue to hook it into our extension framework.
Beyond that, svg2png needs to be modified to use librsvg instead of libsvg. This is probably a fairly simple task, as svg2png is a really short bit of code.
I told Carl about UberConverter. He wasn't sure if the design of Cairo's PDF functionality would match UberConverter's structure, so a crs2pdf via Cairo may not be the right approach.
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.
Bryce