[poppler] Image optimization

[Jeff Muizelaar]

On Sat, May 21, 2005 at 11:54:07AM +0200, Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> A Divendres 20 Maig 2005 04:29, v?reu escriure:
> > cairo gives us transparency, 
> Does this mean there are pdf with transparencies that do not work in Splash 
> and work with Cairo? First time i hear that, if it is that way it's nice, can 
> i have a pointer to such a pdf?

poppler doesn't have transparency support yet, it is just cairo that has
the support.

> 
> > anti-aliasing, 
> As said before no idea this was working, can i see a pdf showing the 
> difference between Splash and Poppler

have a look at http://freedesktop.org/~jrmuizel/circle.pdf

> 
> > less code to be maintained  in poppler 
> And therefore less power to make changes that may be good for poppler but bad 
> for the general usage

I don't really know what these changes would be...

> 
> > a nicer api. 
> Splash API is completely thought to fit xpdf, i can not think how an API can 
> be nicer than that.

It does fit xpdf well but it doesn't necessarily fit pdf well. It
doesn't have support for transparency or shading. It also is not very
suited to hardware acceleration.

> 
> > This isn't really any different than depending on zlib or libjpeg.
> It is, zlib or libjpeg are much more simple and have a determined work to do, 
> Cairo is much more "high level" and such it's goals may not always fit the 
> ones poppler wants (as i said before)

This may be true, but I can't really think of any examples. I am sure
that the cairo developers will certainly do their best to prevent this.

> 
> > No, its way of minimizing changes to stable code, doing less work and
> > encouraging the use of a backend that has more potential.
> 
> Well, imho as Carl said, it is because we are lacking a intermediate class 
> that both CairoOutputdev and SplashOutputDev should inherit and that should 
> contain that lot of non Cairo/Splash dependant code both clases have.

There isn't really a lot of this type of code. The only thing that
really comes to mind is some of the path code. Certainly more such code
could be made, but I don't think it is worth the effort.

-Jeff