[cairo] Using gradients on PS/PDF causes the file size to increase dramatically [60 MB]

[Carl Worth]

On Tue, 8 Nov 2005 22:36:40 +0530, rush ta wrote:
> when i try to use gradients on the PS/PDF files I do not get the desired
> result and I have a PS/PDF file with file size of nearly 60MB i am filling a
> rectangle of ( 1inc * 7 inc) with the gradient....

Short answer: We're working on it.

Long answer:

The gradient support for PS/PDF is still incomplete. This was one of
the particular reasons we decided to mark the PS/PDF backends as
"experimental" and disable them by default in the 1.0.0 and 1.0.2
releases.

There's work going forward rather aggressively at the moment to fix
this, (see some patches I recently sent to the list). With the latest
patches, PostScript output should be correct in basically all cases,
(but it's basically just the one-image-per-page kind of correct
output), improving it to be more vector-oriented, and to have smaller
file sizes is still an on-going project.

And the PDF backend still needs to be hooked up to the meta-surface
before it will get the same benefits that the PostScript backend is
getting right now.

If you want to keep an eye on how things progress, you can watch this
URL:

	http://cairographics.org/ROADMAP

And, (as mentioned there), if you'd like to just wait until we have a
release that provides "support" for the PS and PDF backends, that's
what the upcoming 1.2 release is for.

Note: I just updated the release date for 1.2.0 to 2005-11-15, a
two-week slip. I also split the features into "essential" features
that can cause further slips and "desired" features that will just be
dropped if they're not ready when all the essential features
are. (Meanwhile, I still need to take a closer look at the bug list,
as I think some need to be upgraded to "essential".)

The current ROADMAP is basically just my opinion. If others care about
other things, and want to help make them happen, please feel free to
commit changes to ROADMAP, (or ask for permission so that you can).

-Carl
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