On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 02:59:04PM -0700, Joshua A. Andler wrote:
Bryce Harrington wrote:
So, what we really need is for a couple people who are REALLY BUGGED about this lacking feature to dedicate themselves towards helping us understand it, and help us organize the various ideas that have come up into a plan for fixing it.
Just curious, how good is Cairo's PDF backend? I ask because if it's good and if this could be a first step toward us using Cairo, well, it sounds like an option at least worth exploring to me. And no I'm not really bugged about this feature because I have other tools to make due. ;)
It's definitely an option, and in fact a pretty good one.
I spoke with Carl Worth a bit about this at OLS last year. There's actually two ways it works. The first way basically just creates a bitmap of the SVG and embeds it in the PDF. This of course always *looks* 100% correct, but makes it difficult to edit or manipulate the PDF. The second way is to convert the SVG elements into the corresponding PS/PDF elements. This is more proper, but requires that every conceivable SVG->PS element be accounted for, so means it's much more likely that it will miss some features.
It'd be neat to see someone take an interest in just experimenting with this approach, learning Cairo, and seeing what's possible.
Bryce