[GRASS-dev] Cairo monitor driver

[Glynn Clements]

Dylan Beaudette wrote:

> > Since the Cairo graphics library (http://www.cairographics.org, LGPL
> > licensed) provides very high-quality graphics output in several vector
> > and raster formats, I thought it would make sense to create a "pseudo"
> > monitor driver for it (similar to the PNG and PS drivers). So I did.
> > Cairo does all of the hard work, so it's really mostly simple "glue" code.
> 
> Indeed. I have been using it for all of my R work lately. I don't know why 
> this hasn't come up before, but something like Cairo actually solves a lot of 
> the problems we are facing: high quality on-screen display, output to PDF...
> 
> This would also solve the translucency problem, as Cairo can deal with that 
> quite nicely. 

The problem with translucency is that not all rendering systems
support it. The core X11 protocol doesn't, so you either need the
Render extension or to perform the rendering client-side. PostScript
doesn't support it, as most printers only have one bit per component.

-- 
Glynn Clements <glynn at gclements.plus.com>