GNOME 3590 Published by

A new cairo snapshot 1.3.4 is now available from:

http://cairographics.org/snapshots/cairo-1.3.4.tar.gz

which can be verified with:

http://cairographics.org/snapshots/cairo-1.3.4.tar.gz.sha1
0c412d56c01ea5fcbcfeafdfc6f23b3772a9711e cairo-1.3.4.tar.gz

http://cairographics.org/snapshots/cairo-1.3.4.tar.gz.sha1.asc
(signed by Carl Worth)



Additionally, a git clone of the source tree:

git clone git://git.cairographics.org/git/cairo

will include a signed 1.3.4 tag which points to a commit named:
143c56cb12ee5d0b0fbc5e4039dd4fc88764254d

which can be verified with:
git verify-tag 1.3.4

and can be checked out with a command such as:
git checkout -b build 1.3.4

What's new since 1.3.2?
=======================
This is the second development snapshot in the 1.3 series. It comes one week after the 1.3.2 snapshot.

This snapshot has a couple of significant performance improvements, and also adds new support for producing multi-page SVG output, (when targeting SVG 1.2)---thanks to Emmanuel Pacaud. The details of the performance improvements are as follows:

1. The long-awaited "new tessellator".

The credit for this being an improvement goes to Joonas Pihlaja. He took my really slow code and really put it through its paces to get the dramatic performance improvement seen below (up to 38x faster on realistic cases, and more than 10x faster for the zrusin_another test).

His own writeup of the work he did is quite thorough, but more than can be quoted here. Please see his post for the interesting details:

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/cairo/2006-November/008483.html

(Though note that this snapshot also includes some additional, significant improvements that were only sketched out in that email---see "Generating fewer trapezoids").

2. More floating-point improvements

Daniel Amelang continues to work the magic he began in the 1.3.2 snapshot. This time he short-circuits floating-point transformations by identity matrices and applies the earlier floating-to-fixed-point technique to the problem of rounding.

The improvements here will primarily benefit text performance, and will benefit platforms without hardware floating-point more than those that have it, (some text tests show 20% improvement on an x86 machine and closer to 80% improvement on arm).