[cairo] operator CAIRO_OPERATOR_XOR

[Roman Bednarek]

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004, Carl Worth wrote:

> On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 10:03:52 +0200 (CEST), Roman Bednarek wrote:
> >    Thanks for explanation. The bitwise xor operator was used mainly for
> > achiving "rubber-band" effect, when you draw something twice it
> > disappears. Is it possible to achive the same effect with cairo API? I
> > hope yes, so is there an example of this?
>
> No, there is not any way to implicitly save the background contents due
> to an operator side-effect, (at least as far as I can tell). But we're
> optimistic that things will be plenty fast enough that application
> authors won't feel compelled to resort to hacks like that anyway.
>
> For example, even apart from cairo, I'm beginning to notice that
> applications are now often drawing selection boxes with things like
> filled translucent rectangles rather than XORred outlines.
>

   I was reading some explanations why XOR is not neeeded anymore, when I
was trying to port our application to GDI+, which does not have xor too.
It all seemed qiute reasonable and I was almost convinced, but at the same
time our program was tested on mulitmonitor setup: 2 Geforce Quadro cards
and 6 (later 8) 1280x1024 LCD monitors. All BitBlt operations between
cards were noticeably slow. I had to disable drawing to back buffer on
that setup, because BitBlt from backbuffer to screen was too slow. Of
course xor drawing was as fast as always. I had to postpone GDI+ port.
 In our program we use XOR operations for many things and changing this
would require considerable changes to the program. I hoped that I could
only port our graphics library and the program could remain unchanged.
   I do not know if there are many programs out there which rely on xor
support, but for them porting too cairo will not be easy.

   Roman Bednarek