Re: Cairo

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> For those who are interested: here is an updated version of my
>> cairo patch.

Excellent, thanks!

>> If we kick out ghostscript the \postscript markup will die a lonely
>> death.
> 
> I'd retain the PostScript backend for special purposes.

+1

> A trickier question is how to use it from the command line then
> since by far its most important use case is as an intermediate to
> bitmaps or PDF rather than as final format.

It's not clear to me what you mean.  The PostScript backend doesn't
call ghostscript for creating EPS or PS files, right?  So if we switch
to Cairo for PDF creation, ghostscript won't be called directly.  Am I
missing something?

> A lower-maintenance option (longterm) would be to ultimately
> generate PostScript via Cairo too and make \postscript pass the
> information to Cairo (I presume that Cairo can be given
> backend-specific code).

Sounds sensible.

>> What will happen to the --pspdfopt options?  It's not clear if
>> similar functionality can be implemented via cairo.

We definitely need an ability to create PDFs without embedded fonts.
If necessary we should urge the Cairo people to implement support for
that.  We include zillions of small PDFs in the texinfo documents, and
a post-processor for the texinfo files to handle font embedding is the
best solution to get small final PDF sizes.  I think everything else
can be easily adapted.


    Werner