On Fri, Jan 18, 2008 at 11:30:59PM +0100, Louise Hoffman wrote:
This was speculated about early on, but never came about.
What a shame. I remember their statement about how important it was for join forces to prevent Xara Xtreme from being killed by Illustrator.
I never really got a clear sense of how such a merge would be carried out. Merging the codebases looked to be quite challenging technically, since despite the outward UI similarities, they were implemented considerably differently.
Merging the *projects* (the human element) looked even more challenging, and didn't really get much discussion.
Inkscape is a very community-driven, community-owned project, with decisions made bottom-up through merit and hard work; this sort of structure encourages and incentivizes volunteers. Xara is a more traditional corporate entity, with decisions and directions driven top-down by the management; this type of structure can be less appealing to volunteers (especially ones accustomed to the more free approaches of projects like Inkscape). Fitting those two organizational philosophies together without completely ruining the result would be a major, major achievement.
The piece of most interest in sharing - the renderer - was never open sourced.
Reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xara_Xtreme
I got the impression that it would have to replaced with Cairo no matter what, due to license issues and that Xara's render only compiled on i386?
Yes, that was the approach they ended up taking. But I think the infeasibility of a merge had been pretty evident well before that was decided.
Isn't Cairo superior?
It is, although not for the reasons you might expect. With renderers, people often look at the performance and mathematical correctness as the primary measures. At the time Xara was looking at it, they claimed that their engine was much, much faster than Cairo; cworth was very interested in this, but could never get the benchmarks from them to verify their results. So we don't know if they were using a recent or old version of Cairo, what sorts of optimizations were done, etc. As well, cworth began a long program of focusing on performance starting about that point, and it's possible that today he's closed that gap. It's impossible to say, however, without rerunning the tests; it's conceivable Xara could still rank better on those benchmarks.
But the real reason why Cairo is superior is because it is a widely adopted renderer that's integrated into and supported by the Open Source community as a whole. Using Cairo means you benefit from improvements made in it, and means that you're more likely to remain compatible with other Open Source programs.
The opened portions are mainly the UI, which unfortunately was implemented using wxWindows rather than gtk, so is not directly transferrable.
I see.
That said, if anyone wished to do some mining in the source, perhaps there are useful ideas that could be borrowed?
If you know of a manual for Xara Xtreme, I would love to read it, and make list of features that it have that Inkscape doesn't.
I don't know of one, but would expect their website to carry it if it is available anywhere.
Thanks, Bryce