[cairo] PS backend

[Rob Taylor]

On Mon, 10 May 2004 22:14:51 -0400, "Carl Worth" <cworth at east.isi.edu>
said:
> On Wed, 05 May 2004 10:15:25 -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
> > Around 17 o'clock on May 5, "Rob Taylor" wrote:
> > > i'm going to have to hook into the cairo API at a much higher level than
> > > current backends (the same will go for a decent PDF backend to, i
> > > suppose).
> > 
> > PS doesn't support the whole cairo drawing model, and it has some serious 
> > precision problems in drawing objects, so we want to hook lower than you 
> > might at first think.  For geomtery, we really want cairo to compute 
> > trapezoids and send those to the output device instead of sending the high 
> > level paths.
> 
> That's true, and it's definitely the route we want to take for a
> high-quality output-oriented PDF backend.
> 
> But I can imagine other uses that will require a higher-level
> interface. One compelling scenario is SVG output. For this, users will
> expect to get editable SVG out, (eg. a path must still be a
> path). They'll probably even request that arcs still remain arcs, which
> we could support without too much reworking of the internals.
> 
> So maybe we'll end up with two different routes for generating PDF?

this seems like a sensible route to me, I envisage its becoming somewhat
eqivalent to openoffice's 'export PDF for print, or export PDF for
document exchange'

I would also like to investigate ( a bit further on) adding some sort of
generic metadata interface that the pdf backend (and maybe others) could
use for document-level information.

Rob Taylor