On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 6:04 PM, bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> wrote:
It's always bad when the UI offers two ways to do the same thing without really explaining what's the difference. It's equally bad when UI uses some meaningless techno jargon such as "cairo" :) Unfortunately 0.46 was released still in the middle of a transition period which made both these evils inevitable. Now that we're in 0.47, however, I would like to address this issue by switching all of PS, EPS, and PDF output to cairo, removing the builtin Inkscape exporter, and purging the mentions of "cairo" from the UI.
I'm glad to report that there's been some progress to this. PDF, PS, and EPS are all exported by the same cairo-based exporter which just uses different cairo back-ends. As a result, PS and EPS export have especially changed (PDF export was cairo-based already). All these formats now support clipping and patterns. In PS/EPS, objects with transparency are rasterized, instead of losing transparency as before. There are probably lots of smaller improvements too.
There are of course problems as well. Known and unknown bugs, not all parameters working as they should, etc. Please help improve this area - now is the time to test your PS/EPS/PDF export, report all bugs (and close old ones which are no longer), and of course hack on the code in extension/internal/cairo-render-*. The big upside is that since most of the code is shared, one fix may fix all three export formats.
The only export format still with "cairo" in its name in the UI is "cairo PNG" - do we need it for anything? I think our regular PNG export is much better anyway, so if there are no objections I will comment it out.