Thanks for both your answers, they're both very informative. Sorry abut th ^Ms, the "SmarterMail" web client I'm using is maybe not so smart. The problem'll go away by next week when I get back on my real mail client.

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From: "Joshua A. Andler" <joshua@...533...> Sent: 03 July 2007 12:27 To: joel@...1709... Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Second n00b question: Cairoification

joel@...1709... wrote:

Here's my second question: how's the cairofication coming along?

Cairofication is awaiting a few fixes in Cairo. My understanding is that after that, we're golden.

For me this would be a truly killer feature: fast hardware rendering in OpenGL. What problems stand in the way of us switching over before the next release? I heard about the problem with off-centre elipse gradient fills. Is this the only sticking point? Couldn't we just cludge it by composing the gradient out of loads of bilinear filled triangles, or by a pile of ellipses? Or couldn't we put pressure on the Cairo guys to add support - wouldn't having Inkscape use their engine be a big incentive for them to grease the weels?

Bulia and Carl Worth (a core Cairo dev) know what fixes we need. There are 3 or 4 of them I believe. A couple which are pretty serious. One relates to spurious lines showing up when zooming in. Another relates to Masks not rendering correctly (which you could possibly look into on our end to make it compatible with how Cairo currently wants masks, as it would be faster than waiting for the fix on Cairo's end - per Carl). And there is one or two more that I don't recall offhand. Honestly, before any faster hardware rendering, the biggest benefit we get is half the memory consumption... not to mention free renderer upgrades as Cairo improves.

Or are there other things to think about? or is it simply a work in progress for the assigned developer?

If you would really like to look into making this stuff happen, please let us know. You could also drop by our jabber room or IRC to talk as well.

-Josh