Hi PeterC (and all),
I've changed my mind (again). Let's _completely_ eradicate the
use of GDK in gEDA/gaf (namely gschem) and move forward with cairo.
Sorry, if maintaining / porting some of the new path code etc... to GDK
caused some extra work for you, but I was quite concerned about cairo's
rendering performance a few months ago.
I've changed my mind because:
1) I spent some time benchmarking the last few changes you made in
your branch and the performance is quite good on my pokey
machine.
2) If people want slightly faster rendering performance they can:
- Turn off text anti-aliasing (we should provide a switch
to do so).
- Turn off shape anti-aliasing (we would have to provide a
switch to do so).
I benchmarked your branch (a few commits ago) with the anti-
alias settings turned on/off and saw some improvement.
Or just use an older (GDK only) version of gEDA/gaf.
3) The font rendering and the line/circle rendering is so much
better with cairo. Let's also not spend any time replicating
gschem's silly looking vector font (in cairo) and concentrate
on rendering of standard fonts. I am especially interested
in getting a better match between the on-screen font and the
postscript font. If that means changing sizes of things, then
so be it. Also, getting better image/pdf/etc... rendering
(maybe do the DPI centric approach) would be a *major* win.
4) GDK is dead. Actually I was looking at the light background
settings with GDK rendering and text/circles/line rendering
looks quite dreadful. I will be willing to entertain
switching the default color scheme (with cairo rendering)
if we can get feedback from a non-tainted group of users.
5) Plus all the nifty things with transparency and such would
really distinguish gEDA/gaf from the competition.
I don't know if the above the plan of when your cairo changes can be
merged to master, but I'm hoping this doesn't delay it (if anything it
will hopefully make it easier/faster to merge).
Happy Holidays to all,
-Ales
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