Finally an idea that I like! I have been using Cairo for 6 months now, with little problem.
Keep in mind, tho, that to render svg, you need cairo libpixman libsvg libsvg-cairo
These are all very small, and link statically very easily. This might be one of those occasions where, instead instead of telling people to download them, there is a snapshot on the inkscape.org site.
Cairo has been getting -much- better in the last few weeks, by the way. IMHO, it left libart far behind many months ago.
Bob
Bryce Harrington wrote:
An arguably better approach may be to do the above, but base it off of Cairo instead of Inkscape's renderer. Cairo is also being woven in at the X.org level so my guess is that long term it will become the preferred SVG renderer, over librsvg.
We've talked seriously about eventually replacing Inkscape's renderer with Cairo one day, so it would be in keeping with our plans. It has a well defined API, and is broken up into multiple lib's, allowing us to only load in the specific components required.
The downside is that the time for adding Cairo as a dependency for Inkscape still appears to be in the future. More work is required both on Cairo (speed/capability improvements) and on Inkscape (to be able to hook into alternate renderers). So it may be a little premature to consider it for something like icon rendering. However, it could probably be the most efficient and effective use of effort.
Bryce