I would like to request some testing of and comments on a few changes I have made to the Cairo output driver.
The first, and hopefully least offensive, is the addition of right-click support to xcairo. Advancing to the next page of a plot using the xcairo driver is now possible using either the keyboard (enter) or mouse (right-click). The plot window title is also updated to let the user know that the window is waiting for this input. These changes comes as revisions 9981 and 9982. The second and much larger change affects how plimage and plimagefr. Rather than rendering the polygons which make up the image directly to the plot surface, which is the current default action for both plimage and plimagefr, the image is rendered to an off-screen surface and then overlaid on to the plot. This results in the output of plimage on vector surfaces (PDF, PS, SVG) being pixel-based (raster) rather than vector-based. Aside from greatly speeding up plimage and plimagefr rendering, this has two main effects: a) The individual polygons which make up the plimage output are no longer antialiased when rasterization is in effect. This can be changed, but (in my opinion) the output looks much better this way. b) Vector output for example 20 is around two orders of magnitude smaller: 498652 bytes for x20c-cairo-raster.pdf 871294 bytes for x20c-cairo-raster.ps 12184856 bytes for x20c-cairo-vector.pdf 84609543 bytes for x20c-cairo-vector.ps Since this is rather significant change to the output generated using the Cairo drivers and the plimage functions, I have also added a drvopt command line switch to disable this. For example: /x20c -drvopt rasterize_image=0 will run example 20 with rasterization disabled. In this case, the output should be no different than it was before this change. The rasterized plimage change is added as revision 10003. plimage raster support can be added for other output devices as well. It should be simpler than the older "dev_fastimg" rendering path previously used by the xwin driver as it will (hopefully) require less code on the driver side to implement. Please test and let me know what you think, particularly for example 20 with the default settings and with "-drvopt rasterize_image=0". It works quite well on my system (Ubuntu 9.04 64bit, Cairo 1.8.6) but I don't have easy access to other version of Cairo or other OSs for testing. Thanks, Hez -- Hezekiah M. Carty Graduate Research Assistant University of Maryland Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now for Creativity and Technology (CaT), June 3rd, NYC. CaT is a gathering of tech-side developers & brand creativity professionals. Meet the minds behind Google Creative Lab, Visual Complexity, Processing, & iPhoneDevCamp asthey present alongside digital heavyweights like Barbarian Group, R/GA, & Big Spaceship. http://www.creativitycat.com _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
