[cairo] Cairo vs. Xft glyph rendering

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Mon, 2006-12-11 at 14:08 -0800, Daniel Amelang wrote:
> It looks really good to me. The way you merged the show8/16/32
> functions is a little scary (I wasn't aware that the various Elt*
> structures were binary compatible, but now I do!), but without
> something like a c++ template function, it's probably the best we can
> get. I think you did great under the circumstances.

I had the same feeling as well, but figured that Xft is already doing
that.  So it should be fine.  The funny thing is that I don't think
there's any guarantee that on other systems (say, Darwin), those structs
are binary compatible.  But I don't expect that to happen.

One thing that Xft didn't do but I am, is to use a function pointer for
the XRenderCompositeText* call.  They simply take pointers to different
things.  So again, I think it's a safe assumption.

> I see this quite a bit in various corners of cairo (and in your latest
> patch):
> 
> glyph.index = (unsigned long) -1;
> 
> Would it be safer/more readable to define something like
> CAIRO_GLYPH_INDEX_SKIP in cairoint.h?

Done.  Except that I chose GLYPH_INDEX_SKIP and just did it there.  I
don't think a global thing like that makes much sense.  If another
backends needs to still two values off the index range, let them do.  We
all know that you can take finitely as many as you wish off the top of
them range with no problem, but I don't see enough reason to declare
that globally.

In Pango however, we do that, because that's part of the API, not an
implementation detail like here.

> Also, I see a lot of stuff like this that makes me wonder if some
> additional #defines could make the code more understandable:
> 
> > width = max_index < 256 ? 1 : max_index < 65536 ? 2 : 4;

I personally prefer one-off uses to be inline.  It's easier to audit at
least.  But for anything repeating at least twice, I agree.  In this
case, the other time I'm handling max_index, the code is a bit different
since, silly optimization maybe, because I know width can only go up,
not down.

> Anyway, congratulations for amazing us once again with some great
> work!

Thanks.  It's pushed now, after fixing the XXXs, and testing that the
glyph skipping is actually working.

> Dan
> 
-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

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