[Fontconfig] Re: [Cairo] Text API proposal

[Keith Packard]

Around 23 o'clock on Aug 11, Owen Taylor wrote:

> None of this works for a printer. Depending on the version of Postscript
> and GDI, one may have a few more features than the other, but neither
> is going to be able to handle the full capabilities of Cairo. 
> (Even with GDI+, the details of Alpha compositing modes, etc, are
> different.)

As a first cut, my plan was to simultaneously generate postscript output 
and render to a page-sized image at printer resolution (mondo huge).  
Areas which PostScript could acurately render would be drawn with 
postscript, other areas would be sent as huge images.  Optimizing that to 
avoid the huge buffer by saving data in some metafile format might be 
generally useful, both to avoid the giant pixmap unless necessary and also 
to permit striping of the output.

Hmm.  We could specify a metafile format and require a post-processing 
stage to convert that for the printer.  In the best of all possible 
worlds, that format could be PDF...

-ketih