On Wed, Dec 13, 2006 at 07:57:34PM -0600, Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
Again, I'm not sure how does all the stuff works and ties together, but my understanding is that Inkscape is starting to support Cairo as its rendering backend through GTK. I'm not completely sure, though, and Inkscape may not be actually using Cairo as the rendering backend yet (though I believe reading about support for Cairo in Inkscape somewhere).
To fill in this bit - no, Inkscape does not currently use Cairo for its rendering backend; we've planned to switch to it at some point in the future, but so far this is still in the discussion phase. We haven't started experimenting with using Cairo for our backend.
Now, what you might have picked up on is that some development work has gone on for using Cairo for our PDF file exporter. File exporters are peripheral extensions to Inkscape, so they are fairly distinct things we can pull in or out pretty easily. Also, it gave a good way to get our feet wet with Cairo. However, while this Cairo-based PDF exporter was a major goal for 0.45, the PDFs generated by Cairo weren't as good as we'd hoped (it rasterized too much of the drawing) so we will be releasing 0.45 with the existing PDF file format, and hope that Cairo will catch up and we can try again for 0.46.
For switching the renderer itself to Cairo, there's a couple things that would need to be in place. First, we'd need a canvas layer atop Cairo; potentially we could adapt our existing canvas to use Cairo, or there is a Cairo canvas library named Papyrus which we could look at. Second, there has been concerns that Cairo's performance may be less than our current renderer; Cairo's received a lot of performance enhancements recently, but I guess we won't really know for certain until we have it hooked up and users can play with it. :-)
Anyway, I hope this fills in some info about the Cairo/Inkscape status.
Bryce