Re: [Dev-luatex] And now for something completely different...

luigi scarso writes:

On Tue, Aug 23, 2016 at 5:37 PM, David Kastrup wrote:

...

So this does not really save us from doing our own PDF backend eventually (it's not like Cairo's imaging model would not match that of PostScript and PDF pretty well anyway). But looking at that file list, I thought it was worth asking.

All the best

Pehaps http://mupdf.com/

mutool has a "draw" command :

Well, we do all the font handling and whatever else already in our PostScript backend (which then uses ps2pdf in case a PDF is desired), so it does not seem like we are going to win a lot. The one thing that PostScript does and PDF doesn't (IIRC) is drawing with a pen. METAFONT does this by not actually drawing with something like a circular pen but instead using polygonal pens, and as a result, the outlines when drawing along a Bezier-spline path are still piece-wise Bezier. At any rate, this kind of path digitization is where PS->PDF conversion is likely to result in large (and approximate) files rather than just simple format transfer. So that's where we'll likely have to code some stuff ourselves rather than just do straightforward output. Our bitmap output is, again, PS->whatever. As opposed to the PS->PDF route, at least there is only one stage of rasterization, namely Ghostscript. -- David Kastrup