Hi.

I just wonder. In this post it's said that rendering engine will be shifted.

Is it reasonable to expect that some of the long lasting bugs will finally come to an end?

Right now I'm thinking of following bugs that I find annoying:
165780 Pattern Gaps
707255 Layer dialog - symbols dissappear when mouse hover over (not an old bug, but still annoying).

Grobe wrote:707255 Layer dialog - symbols dissappear when mouse hover over (not an old bug, but still annoying).

The fix for this is completely unrelated to switching the internal renderer used for the canvas.

Please note that the official stable release for Windows (0.48.1-2) does not have this issue (you either downloaded Inkscape 0.48.1 before it was officially announced, or are using a development snapshot).

~suv wrote:

Grobe wrote:707255 Layer dialog - symbols dissappear when mouse hover over (not an old bug, but still annoying).

The fix for this is completely unrelated to switching the internal renderer used for the canvas.

Please note that the official stable release for Windows (0.48.1-2) does not have this issue (you either downloaded Inkscape 0.48.1 before it was officially announced, or are using a development snapshot).

I use the latest development version just of curiosity. At the time I use Inkscape 0.48+devel r10115.

It's just a bit of habit that I choose the latest one rather than the official

Grobe wrote:I just wonder. In this post it's said that rendering engine will be shifted.

Is it reasonable to expect that some of the long lasting bugs will finally come to an end?

Right now I'm thinking of following bugs that I find annoying:
165780 Pattern Gaps

From what I have heard about the gsoc-cairo branch [1], pattern gaps will no longer occur after switching the internal renderer to cairo.

[1] at the moment, the cairo branch fails to build on Windows and OS X - once those issues have been addressed, it is planned to merge the cairo-branch into the development branch [*] (so it will be available for testing), but don't expect a release of 0.49 this year.

Is there any news on switching the renderer?

I have a few questions:
Will fonts render crisper?
Will there be performance improvements?

SeanJM wrote:Is there any news on switching the renderer?

No. It's on the roadmap for Inkscape 0.49. The next step will be merging the cairo-rendering branch into the current development tree (Inkscape trunk).

SeanJM wrote:Will fonts render crisper?

No idea what you are referring to. Any screenshots you can provide to illustrate your problem here? Or is this about the well-known feature request to optionally disable anti-aliasing of text objects on-canvas as well as when exporting to bitmap (using font hinting instead, afaiu)? As far as I understand (but I'm not really informed about how internally the rendering of text is handled) that's not directly related to cairo, but more about which backend or rasterizer is used for text/fonts (inkscape currently depends on freetype 2, fontconfig, pango))

SeanJM wrote:Will there be performance improvements?

That's one of the main goals of switching to a newer renderer. The GSoC project from last year will be continued this year (acceptance still pending), mainly focusing on performance issues.

Performance issues are also solved by many small optimizations other than Cairo.

For example a new routine used to calculate Gaussian blur (introduced in recent and already available development releases : in rev 10144 if I remember well) accelerates now nicely the rendering of most filters which use it extensively like this is the case for the new customizable filters.

ivan

~suv wrote:

SeanJM wrote:Is there any news on switching the renderer?

No. It's on the roadmap for Inkscape 0.49. The next step will be merging the cairo-rendering branch into the current development tree (Inkscape trunk).

I am looking forward to it.

~suv wrote:

SeanJM wrote:Will fonts render crisper?

No idea what you are referring to. Any screenshots you can provide to illustrate your problem here? Or is this about the well-known feature request to optionally disable anti-aliasing of text objects on-canvas as well as when exporting to bitmap (using font hinting instead, afaiu)? As far as I understand (but I'm not really informed about how internally the rendering of text is handled) that's not directly related to cairo, but more about which backend or rasterizer is used for text/fonts (inkscape currently depends on freetype 2, fontconfig, pango))

Disabling Anti-aliasing would be enough for me. However, font hinting sounds exactly like what I am looking for.

~suv wrote:

SeanJM wrote:Will there be performance improvements?

That's one of the main goals of switching to a newer renderer. The GSoC project from last year will be continued this year (acceptance still pending), mainly focusing on performance issues.

Thank you,

Sean