kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Maciej Sumiński <maciej.suminski@xxxxxxx>]

On 11/07/2013 07:12 PM, "Torsten Hüter" wrote:
> Hi Orson,
> thanks for the great work!
> When I've developed the Cairo backend, my idea was not only to use Cairo
> for printing but also as rendering engine for eeschema. For example
> compare GEDA gschem, they use there Cairo as well and the screen
> output looks in my opinion much better than eeschema (antialiasing /
> freetype fonts).
> On my machine I've found Cairo not that slow for smaller boards - but I
> have an Intel Core I7. Perhaps it makes sense to hide the Cairo switch
> in another menu entry?
> There is also a third backend that I've written last year, Orson has not
> included it - it uses wxDC. But wxDC has some drawbacks, it does not
> support transparency. Perhaps still useful as fallback solution ..
> Bye,
> Torsten

Hi Torsten,

To tell the truth, I must have missed the source code for wxDC backend. 
Maybe it is worth a try, but probably now it would have to be adapted to 
the changes introduced to GAL. If you have a more or less working 
version, maybe you can compare performance of both backends?
The performance drop in Cairo case is caused by 
cairo_push_group()/cairo_pop_group() - it was the only way for me to 
make the output consistent with OpenGL. I bet it could go faster for the 
price of looking a bit strange in areas where items (eg. tracks) 
overlap. If anyone is more curious about that - I can do some tests and 
show examples.

Regards,
Orson

> *Gesendet:* Donnerstag, 07. November 2013 um 18:59 Uhr
> *Von:* "Wayne Stambaugh" <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> *An:* Kein Empfänger
> *Cc:* kicad-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> *Betreff:* Re: [Kicad-developers] Cairo rendering backend
> On 11/7/2013 12:36 PM, Maciej Sumiński wrote:
>  > On 11/05/2013 07:40 PM, Wayne Stambaugh wrote:
>  >> On 11/5/2013 4:33 AM, Maciej Sumiński wrote:
>  >>> Does anyone have anything against disabling switching (remove its
> hotkey
>  >>> and menu entry) to Cairo backend? I think it may only give a bad
>  >>> impression to users, as it is too slow for comfortable work. I am going
>  >>> to maintain it in case that there are changes in the GAL, but as it was
>  >>> said in the beginning - its main purpose is for PDF generation or
>  >>> printing.
>  >>>
>  >>> Regards,
>  >>> Orson
>  >>>
>  >>
>  >> I'm fine with disabling it. It's not useful for display rendering even
>  >> on my home computer which is very fast. I can't image how slow it must
>  >> be on an older system or laptop. Is there any other reason to Cairo
>  >> rendering around?
>  >>
>  >
>  > It could be used as a fallback renderer, but right now it is too slow
>  > for that, so - in fact, there is no sensible reason.
>  >
>  > Regards,
>  > Orson
>  >
>  >
>
> Doesn't it make more sense to fallback to the wxDC rendering? It's
> known to work well except under certain conditions on OSX. You cannot
> perform any editing other than using the P&S router so I'm not sure that
> it's very useful as a fallback.
>
> Wayne
>
>
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