Simple questions!! Are there any plans to make thebes work on DirectFB??
Thank you for your effort to Mozilla.

Best,
Jaesik

And in turn, I would like you to ask 2 things:
- you mentioned PDF output: does it support CMYK?
- and kerning: what king of kerning? The one inside a font or automatic (optical)? Does a text look different on each platform?

Does anybody know where I can find something about the acceleration in Glitz? The official website is not very up to date and I can’t find documentation.

Glitz is not designed for DirectX but isn’t it possible to use Glitz and OpenGL on Windows?

Regards
Jc

This is basically the full presentation so far :) I plan on doing two more blog posts at some point, but for that I only have slides.. and they’d mostly be meaningless without some words around them.

Matthias,

Yep, the plan is to move to hardware accelerated rendering using OpenGL and/or DirectX as appropriate. We probably wont’ be using Glitz though, but will develop a different backend for OpenGL/DX as glitz is heavily unmaintained at the moment and there are some things we’d like to do differently. But work on that probably won’t start for another few months at least.

Regards.

Hi Vlad,

Are there still plans to do hardware accelerated rendering? Eg by using Glitz (so OpenGL) as back-end, and if so on which platforms? My guess is Glitz only makes sense for Linux, or is that wrong?
And if Glitz is limited to Linux, do you guys consider making a DirectX back-end for Cairo (a plan for that was mentioned on the mozilla or the cairo wiki once I think) to have hardware accelaration on Windows? My guess is this would be really useful on Vista since GDI( ) is no longer accelerated as it was on XP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Device_Interface#GDI_and_GDI.2B_applications_in_Windows_Vista).

Greetings,

Matthias

@pd: I’ll echo what Toe said — Cairo isn’t really relevant for doing rounded borders and the like. Microsoft already has the graphics capabilities of Cairo available through GDI (unaccelerated) or through MILCORE (private, unpublished, accelerated); they just choose to not support CSS features such as border-radius.

Cairo is a library that programs use to display 2D graphics. That program could be a drawing application, a game, a word processor, an MP3 player, or anything else that needs to display moderately complex graphics. The nice thing about it is that it’s highly cross-platform. An application can say ‘draw this complex shape and composite it with these other complex shapes’, and Cairo will draw the result on any of several different platforms. That saves the need for the application itself to produce one piece of code for Mac, another for Windows, and another for Linux. The app just produces one piece of code for Cairo, and then Cairo handles the platform-specific stuff.

Thebes is essentially a piece of code that provides an interface between Cairo and the inner workings of Mozilla’s Gecko engine.

What you’re looking for will most likely be done in CSS, eventually. Gecko will read the CSS code specifying the rounded corner, figure out its size/placement/color/etc, then send it through the Thebes -> Cairo -> Operating System rendering pipeline to your screen.