On Sat, 17 Jun 2006 00:10:39 +0100, Alex Bligh wrote: > > Ghostscript has a pluggable backend system so it can write vectors to > printer drivers. While several print as bitmaps, several don't. There > is (or will be) a Cairo backend. OK. I see where you're going now. Yes, ghostscript's pluggable backend system is definitely the right way to get PostScript import for Xara. And there is even the possibility of having cairo involved here. I don't believe that a cairo-based ghostscript backend yet, but I would certainly love to see one get written. And it's quite likely this will happen at some point, I think. Once that is in place it would be possible to use cairo's multi-backend system to write something that generates Xara files. Whether that's an independently useful thing to do might depend on what your goals are for the Xara file format. Is this something where you'd like to see a standard "Export as .xar" option in every application? If so, then making a new cairo backend to write Xara files would make a lot of sense. Or are you fine with using other formats for standard interchange, and just leaving .xar as a private format for Xara? In that case, I don't think one would get a lot of use out of a new cairo backend. So, today, it looks like the options for getting a GS->Xara path would be: 1) Write a cairo backend for GS and a Xara backend for cairo. 2) Write a Xara backend for GS Looking only at those two options, it certainly looks like the second is less work than the first, (even if I would personally like to see the GS->cairo thing get written). -Carl
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