On Wed, 17 Oct 2007 12:22:30 -0700, MenTaLguY wrote:
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.
OK. Thanks for explaining.
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).
Yes, there have been a *lot* of improvements on cairo's trunk. And I'd definitely like to take advantage of inkscape users to get some testing on that. So I'll make a cairo 1.5.2 snapshot either today or tomorrow, (I'll followup to this message to let you know about it), which should help testing.
I think two things we need to do at this point are:
get people reporting PDF problems to include their cairo version in the report (this may be something we should display in the about dialog)
find someone to assemble a test suite of cases we expect PDF export not to rasterize[1]
Both ideas sound great. For what it's worth, cairo-generated PDF output should be including it's version in there already. (There's a bug in that cairo doesn't also let inkscape report its version in the output as well---we should fix that.)
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. :/
Well, depending on what your testing shows, how about doing cairo-based PDF export if cairo is of a sufficient version, and using the old PDF export if cairo is not new enough.
That seems like a much better plan than having two competing options, or having to rip out code again that some people might be expecting to use already. It does depend on the switch to a "new enough cairo" not introducing any objectionable regressions for your users, of course. So that's where the testing will help, (let's get things fixed so that inkscape can just trust cairo with a version greater than or equal to 1.5.x for some x).
Sound good?
-Carl