[Poppler-bugs] [Bug 25240] New: Cairo backend for Qt4 wrapper

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

http://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25240

           Summary: Cairo backend for Qt4 wrapper
           Product: poppler
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: Other
        OS/Version: All
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: qt4 frontend
        AssignedTo: poppler-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
        ReportedBy: pdgiddie+freedesktop at gmail.com


Splash has served Poppler very well, but I believe most will agree that it's
starting to show its age.  In my opinion, this is made particularly apparent in
Splash's inability to render fonts on a subpixel level.  I tried my hardest to
fix Splash to allow this, but grayscale fonts are a deeply embedded concept in
Splash, and I eventually gave up.

On the other hand, it seems that most current effort is going into the Cairo
backend, which is used by the GTK2 wrapper (e.g. Evince), and it's certainly
possible to enable subpixel-rendered fonts in the Cairo backend (see #3307).

My proposal is to introduce support for the Cairo backend to the Qt4 wrapper,
so that Qt-based viewers (such as Okular) may be able to benefit from future
enhancements of the Cairo backend, especially subpixel-rendering.  I created a
patchset to add the Cairo backend to the Qt4 wrapper; it may be found here:
http://github.com/giddie/poppler-qt4-cairo-backend.  I am only suggesting the
merging of patches 1 and 2 to Poppler; the remainder of the patches are simply
hacks to force subpixel rendering, but once the Cairo backend is merged, it
will be possible to add more elegant support to the client applications to
enable or disable subpixel rendering.

It has been suggested that adding a dependency on Cairo to a Qt application is
a controversial step.  Please bear in mind that the Qt wrapper will only
provide an interface to the Cairo backend if Cairo support has been enabled at
compile-time, and Qt applications are free to choose between backends at
run-time.  It seems unlikely that anyone would be inconvenienced by the
addition of the *option* to use Cairo.


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