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Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Printing on Linux



On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 22:38:23 +0100, "Charles Moir" wrote:
> 
> Same works with our fills. You can say 'I understand linear and radial
> fills but nothing else' and our filter system rasterises more complex
> fills as bitmap fills inside bezier paths.
> 

This sounds very useful indeed.

> Carl, when Cairo talks to its PDF and SVG backends do you pass through
> transparency and blend mode information. If so this would this would be
> very interesting indeed, as it would be a means to producing
> un-flattened vector output (whereas our existing EPS and PS printing
> solution will rasterise all transparency).  That would be very cool
> because we'd get not just three filters for the price of one, but it
> would be nice clean vector objects with vector grad fills and
> transparency.

Yes, we do pass transparency through when possible for PDF and
SVG.

For PDF, we aren't currently supporting native gradient fills, (though
we should be---we had some code that was functional for many cases,
but we ended up turning it off rather than just characterizing which
fills it handles properly). Other than that, any blending with the
default OVER compositing operator will be passed through natively to
PDF.

For SVG, we're already doing better than that. We're supporting all of
cairo's gradients. And if the user is targeting SVG 1.2, then we spit
out native SVG for all of cairo's Porter/Duff compositing
operators. For SVG 1.1, we do like we do in PDF and use image
fallbacks for any compositing operator other than OVER.

So we've got a similar system of capabilities and fallbacks compared
to Xara. Ours is still all in-library and the capabilities are
open-coded rather than encapsulated in chunks of XML.

Oh, and there's a tiny bit of code missing for doing the
minimal-region stuff when image-based fallbacks are necessary. Right
now, cairo will always emit full-page images as soon as any fallbacks
are needed on a page. Obviously, we'll be fixing that before too long.

-Carl

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