[Cairo] Preliminary PostScript output support in cairo-0.1.11

[Thorsten Behrens]

Yesterday, Bill wrote:

> That will just move the discontinuity further away. Imagine if they print a
> transparent rectangle over a portion of the text. If the "entities" are
> characters then you will see a discontinuity between adjacent letters between
> the last outside one and the first one that intersects the rectangle.
>
Of course, this is not a perfect solution, either (PDF is). Although, we
found it visually more pleasant when the discontinuity does not appear
_within_ a connected drawing. That is, the human eye is more sensitive to
width/position/color/whatever discontinuities in a single stroke, than
between disjunct strokes. But of course, YMMV, there might be cases where
a different handling produces better results. The example Gustavo gave
might indeed be such a borderline case, because the transparent rectangle
has a hairline black border, which is a natural discontinuity in itself,
and makes the crossing line's discontinuity less apparent.

> Then again it sounds like you have worked on this, while I have not, so if
> you can explain why your solution is better I would like to know.
>
As all this tampers with our visual cortex, bullet-proof arguments are
somewhat hard to come by. Although, the statements of the preceding
paragraph about human vision are pretty much agreed upon from cognitive
and neuro sciences.

Regards,

-- 

Thorsten

"Historically speaking, the presence of wheels in Unix has never precluded
their reinvention." [Larry Wall]