[cairo] Patterns in PDF output

[Adrian Johnson]

Kristof Van Landschoot wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> We've upgraded to Cairo 1.6.4 and even though the improvements are 
> impressive there's one thing that seems lacking for us.
> 
> When outputting a pattern fill it seems a new PDF pattern is created for 
> each time we use the fill on a path.  This is not wrong in itself, but 
> we have some files where a pattern is reused a lot and that makes the 
> PDF file becomes pretty heavy.  To the extent that Acrobat Reader 
> refuses to render them and Preview on OS X starts to bog down.

This is a known problem. Not re-embedding the same pattern or image is 
on the roadmap [1].

> 
> Is there a workaround for this?

Depending on whether the paths are intersecting and the fill mode you
are using, you can add multiple paths to the current path before doing a 
fill.

[1] http://www.cairographics.org/roadmap/