[cairo] keeping paths as doubles through high-level backend interface

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Fri, 2007-11-02 at 18:58 -0400, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
> Before I start coding this up, I wanted to get opinions on whether  
> this was a good idea, and any problems that might come up.  (I think I  
> wrote about this a while back, but it may have been in part of a  
> different thread -- I can't find the post at the moment.

Thanks for bringing this up.  I hit this issue again last week, and it's
really bad.  Just have a surface with a deivce_offset.x of > 32000 and
you simply can't draw anything to it.  Including text using gdk!
Because even cairo_get_current_point() is broken...

> Right now, cairo users specify path coordinates and operations using  
> doubles; these doubles are then transformed by the CTM (using fp  
> math), and then they are converted to fixed point for storage.   
> However, many backends would prefer to have the full precision  
> floating point number available -- PS, PDF, SVG, Quartz are the  
> initial ones that come to mind.  I propose changing the normal path  
> storage and the backend API interface such that the doubles are stored  
> directly, and a conversion function to a fixed point path is provided  
> when a fixed path is currently needed (or maybe not -- maybe we should  
> just use the double-to-fixed routines wherever necessary). That is,  
> fallback_stroke,fill,etc. would do the conversion from double->fixed  
> before continuing.  This shouldn't affect any current users,  
> especially on platforms with a FPU, as the conversion would still take  
> place, just at a different time.  However, even those platforms would  
> end up benefitting from higher fidelity PS/PDF output.

Please go ahead.  That should fix most of our 16.16 issue.  As much that
we may be able to get away with it and postpone 24.8 switch for later.


> We could even take this a step further and define a cairo_path_coord_t  
> and a handful of helper macros; if that type was used instead of  
> doubles, it then becomes much easier to create a version of cairo that  
> uses fixed point arithmetic for all operations -- which may be  
> interesting to platforms that lack a FPU.

Sounds like a good plan.

> Does this sound like a good plan?

Really good one.  Looking forward to reviewing it.


>      - Vlad

PS.  What needs to be done in the 24.8 branch?  Can we get that moving
too?

-- 
behdad
http://behdad.org/

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