[cairo] Meta surface proposal

[Owen Taylor]

On Sun, 2005-02-06 at 14:01 -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
> Around 16 o'clock on Feb 6, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> > cairo_meta_surface_t is a helper surface type that is used for surface
> > types where:
> 
> One thought expressed here before is to use the PDF generated by cairo as 
> the meta file format, and use files instead of memory to hold the data.  
> Of course, we could easily stream the PDF into memory for environments 
> without a (large) mutable file system.
> 
> It would tie the PDF backend to our cairo-specific PDF reader, which may 
> make development in that area more difficult.  But, it would eliminate yet 
> another graphics "file" format and make it significantly easier to test 
> the writer and reader separately.

Why we conceivably want to drag the PDF rendering model into the
equation for rendering to a printer on Windows? That sounds like an
incredible headache for no gain compared to sticking with something
simpler.

Note there is no "file" in the meta surface, it's just a list of
primitives with extra information (need an image fallback). You only
need one page at a time, so I don't think memory size will be a big
issue.

One thing that is needed for this eventually is copy-on-write for image
surfaces so you can multiply modify an image surface and repeatedly show
it when writing to a meta surface.

Regards,
						Owen

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