[cairo] cairo backend for xpdf - first drop

[Carl Worth]

On Mon, 20 Dec 2004 19:54:12 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> I found an embarrasing bug in it. It kept reading the fonts over and
> over again. With that fixed, and with all the performance fixes in Cairo
> cvs xpdf-cairo now feels faster than the standard xpdf on my machine.
> 
> I'm attaching the new patch.

Alexander,

This is fantastic work. I think I may have found a new favorite PDF
viewer.

The rendering of the glyphs is so much nicer compared to standard
xpdf. Though I notice that the improved hinting allows some extra room
in which the intra-word spacing could be improved. To my eye,
intra-word problems, (such as two adjacent letters colliding) stand
out more with the hinting of xdpf-cairo, whereas with xpdf-standard
the words are just blurry everywhere.

Do you generally still have word structure available in PDF files? Or
is every glyph already placed individually?

Meanwhile, line art appears to have better snapping with
xpdf-standard, (or more likely that's just the lack of
antialiasing). I've been meaning to propose a cairo_set_snapping API
for some time and I think this application gives us perfect
justification and some great test cases for that.

Oh, and we still need to add sub-pixel rendering to cairo fonts,
(geometry too!), to make things even more legible.

Once we get all that done, I think it might even be pleasant to read
many documents on a display instead of printing them out.

I'm quite happy to see this area improve.

-Carl