[Cairo] Color transforms

Thorsten.Behrens at Sun.COM Thorsten.Behrens at Sun.COM
Fri Jul 18 02:15:15 PDT 2003


On Jul 17, Carl wrote:

> I might take a contrary view that "printing" shouldn't be any harder
> than any other kind of graphics creation. For example, I'd like to be
> able to take a chunk of code that generates a PNG and just flip a
> switch at one point in the code and generate a PDF instead.
>
I don't see the point here. By definition, your PNG rendering code does
not care about printing, and does not have to. So in neither scenario will
it contain anything specific to printing. The 'new_page' and
'use_this_printer' calls are typically at other, isolated code places,
which, again by definition, have to know about printing.

> show_page is certainly one one truly unique capability. Are there many
> others that people can think of?
>
As others said, PDF has loads of specialities. I don't think it's wise to
provide all that in cairo. Maybe an opaque pipe-through could cater for
all the people who want to play tricks with hyperlinks, scripts, and the
like.

I'm currently asking myself whether font embedding is necessary at the
interface, but probably one can also handle that transparently within the
device-specific driver.

-- 

Thorsten

Word Perfect isn't, Excel doesn't, Works won't.






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