More evaluation info about the PDF backend in Cairo

---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 16:40:10 -0500 From: Carl Worth <cworth@...43...> To: Alexander Larsson <alexl@...43...> Cc: cairo <cairo@...278...> Subject: Re: [cairo] cairo backend for xpdf - first drop

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 19:54:12 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:

I found an embarrasing bug in it. It kept reading the fonts over and over again. With that fixed, and with all the performance fixes in Cairo cvs xpdf-cairo now feels faster than the standard xpdf on my machine.

I'm attaching the new patch.

Alexander,

This is fantastic work. I think I may have found a new favorite PDF viewer.

The rendering of the glyphs is so much nicer compared to standard xpdf. Though I notice that the improved hinting allows some extra room in which the intra-word spacing could be improved. To my eye, intra-word problems, (such as two adjacent letters colliding) stand out more with the hinting of xdpf-cairo, whereas with xpdf-standard the words are just blurry everywhere.

Do you generally still have word structure available in PDF files? Or is every glyph already placed individually?

Meanwhile, line art appears to have better snapping with xpdf-standard, (or more likely that's just the lack of antialiasing). I've been meaning to propose a cairo_set_snapping API for some time and I think this application gives us perfect justification and some great test cases for that.

Oh, and we still need to add sub-pixel rendering to cairo fonts, (geometry too!), to make things even more legible.

Once we get all that done, I think it might even be pleasant to read many documents on a display instead of printing them out.

I'm quite happy to see this area improve.

-Carl _______________________________________________ cairo mailing list cairo@...278... http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/cairo