[cairo] Observations from a newb

[Gerdus van Zyl]

You must remember that cairo follows the simple is beautiful and no
duplication philosophy. It does not duplicate when other free
libraries can do the same and better.

1. ctx.draw_svg(<svg object>)
- librsvg is very good,has a liberal license and draws using cairo so
there is no need to duplicate.
- My wishlist however is to have librsvg output to cairo commands or
capture the commands somehow, so i can compile in svg art without the
librsvg dependency.
2. Other image file formats - GIF,JPG
- cairo is mostly a drawing/rendering library and as such file formats
is not really part of the statement of intent
- cairo does provide a get image data api so you can eg: use PIL in
python to save/load to any format you desire.
3. cairo is not a font library
- pango is awesome just wish it was a little faster on latin text :-)
- I sympathize with people who are trying to use custom fonts with
cairo since it can be a pain and not always accessible from python.

I don't know if there would be interest in two versions of cairo?
cairo-core = same as now
cairo-framework = cairo+pango+librsvg+canvas/scenegraph (in one virtual library)

Since most people expect cairo-framework but get cairo-core plus build
your own framework.

~Gerdus van Zyl


On Nov 8, 2007 11:32 AM, Donn <donn.ingle at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> As a stranger to the cairo concept, and given the various posts I have skimmed
> on this list, I must say that these things have struck me as needed:
>
> 1. ctx.draw_svg(<svg object>)
> Where <svg object> has been pre-fetched from a file and parsed and so forth.
> It would only include those drawing concepts that translate into cairo (so, I
> assume, no blurring and so forth).
>  This make sense to me from a practical pov: it's much easier to draw
> something in Inkscape than it is to do it in code.
>  But since we are coding, it makes sense to be able to bring the svg "into"
> the code so we can do other stuff too.
>  Think of the <svg object> as a source perhaps. A symbol. A group.
>
> Oh, BTW, I mean that the SVG is drawn by cairo commands, not converted into a
> monolithic bitmap of some kind, although that could be optional.
>
> 2. I have not reached images in my experiments yet, but I think that if PNGs
> are in, then JPG and a few others should be in too. Even if they are
> internally converted to PNGs.
>
> 3. Fonts - my first few posts here and in other places led to a fantastic
> ctypes solution for loading arbitrary fonts from a file path (for which the
> credit is entirely due to others.) I really think that the ideal would be to
> have that inside cairo so that *something* like this can be done:
> cairo.font_faces.append(path + "DizzyMartians.ttf") #or OTF, or Type1
> myface = ctx.fetch_face("DizzyMartians")
> ctx.select_font_face(myface,...,...)
>
> I hope I don't insult anyone, I'm just observing out loud :)
>
> \d
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