Re: [XaraXtreme-dev] Arbitrary EPS/PS/PDF import & Cairo

[Alex Bligh <alex@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carl,

> 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.

Quite possibly, but I /think/ we could just do this with a GS backend
the same way PDFs are currently produced from programs that produce
printer output (i.e. "print to .xar"). Not perhaps ideal, but...

> 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.

We have yet to discover a vector file format which isn't lossy with
respect to .xar files (though I'd love there to be one). So given that,
we hope people will embed .xar files if they want to retain everything.

If they simply want to move around portable non-editable stuff, we have
bitmaps and eps for that too (which means there is no plugin etc. needed)
but that's only useful for interchange in one direction (out of Xara)
really.

> 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).

Yep you are probably right.

Alex