[poppler] Cairo Backend for Qt Wrapper

[Paul Gideon Dann]

On Monday 15 June 2009 22:19:41 Albert Astals Cid wrote:
> You still have to show me a PDF that has better font rendering in Cairo
> than in Splash (not that i say it is not better/worse, but you failed to
> provide evidence)

Fair enough :)  It really applies to pretty much any PDF containing text.  
I'll pick as an example the "Little Manual of API Design":

PDF:
http://chaos.troll.no/~shausman/api-design/api-design.pdf

Splash:
http://content.screencast.com/users/giddie/folders/Poppler/media/bedb904f-
eedb-4899-ba90-759ab7b08ce1/api-design_splash.png

Cairo with FIR5 and Slight Hinting:
http://content.screencast.com/users/giddie/folders/Poppler/media/1fe79252-
a8f9-4741-b354-a06baf3dc0ed/api-design_cairo-fir5-slighthint.png

> No, most distros would compile it enabled because Cairo is cool and then i
> would have a horde of Qt purists/trolls shouting me because now they have
> to install the Cairo shit to view PDF, and sincerely, i prefer you (1
> person) to all Qt purists/trolls shouting at me.

Hehe, nice line :)  I understand your position, and maybe you're right.  I 
think you're underestimating distro packagers though.  They're aware of the 
politics, and 90% of the time it's the packagers that have to take the flak 
from users, so I know they consider their options carefully.

I have to admit to being caught a little off-guard by your argument.  Surely 
we want to provide choice, don't we?  Some distros are purist, some are 
liberal.  If you don't merge this for fear of upsetting the purists, you're 
cheating the liberals.  If you provide the choice, the decision (and 
responsibility) is theirs and not yours.

Paul