[scribus-dev] backends rewrite

[Andreas Vox]

Am 15.01.2011 um 19:31 schrieb Alexandre Prokoudine:

> Hi,
> 
> Yesterday avox mentioned that the team is planning to rewrite PDF, PS
> and SVG backends, and work on rewriting PDF one has already started.
> 
> First of all, I'd like to know if I got it right.
> 
> If I got it right, then I'd like to know why it was decided to do so
> instead of fixing Cairo, which already has PDF, PS and SVG backends,
> and let everyone benefit from the changes (especially Inkscape).

Hi Alexandre!

This hasn't been an official team decision, but the way I see it we currently have
different code for rendering to PDF, PS, SVG and screen. Especially with the
new text layout code it will not be feasible to maintain this, so the idea is to
use a common ScPainter interface. This will need appropriate refactoring/rewrite
of the PDF, PS and SVG output code.

The question if the ScPainter implementations for PDF, PS and SVG use the
corresponding cairo backend is independent of that. Currently we do a lot of
things in PDF output that's just not possible with cairo (shared objects, Javascript,
forms, annotations, CMYK, ...). It's much easier for us to reconcile this stuff with
an ScPainter implementation than rewriting the cairo PDF surface to become a 
full fledged PDF output library. 

/Andreas