[cairo] Question about how Firefox 3 switching to use cairo as the graphics engine

[Vladimir Vukicevic]

On Feb 18, 2008, at 9:05 PM, ying lcs wrote:
> Thank you Vald.  I am actually trying to understand why
> Firefox on linux does not print (both using printer or the Canvas API)
> any flash plugin content, but on
> windows it works.
>
> I am wondering if the fact that FF3 moves to cairo will fix this
> problem. But from my testing with FF3 on linux, that does not fix
> that.

Plugins on linux are a very different beast than win32/osx, because  
there isn't a standard printing interface on linux like there is on  
the other platforms.  I believe that the NPAPI provides only one way  
to print plugins on linux, and that's a "Give me an Encapsulated  
PostScript stream" method that is called while printing, with the  
result stuck into the output.  Obviously, this doesn't work unless  
you're manually generating postscript output.  However, I'm pretty  
sure that the only implementor of this API on linux is the Java  
plugin; future revs of NPAPI on linux will probably use cairo directly  
(or at least, I'm going to push heavily in that direction).

     - Vlad