First, here's the simplest web page I was able to construct to show
the problem, (nothing more than a single-cell table with a border):
-[[bug.html]] (122 bytes).
+[[bug]] (122 bytes).
Using Firefox3 with cairo 1.6.4 on a Fedora9 system, I did a "print to
file" and obtained the following PDF output: [[bug.pdf]] (14,465
bytes).
-This output is still quite accurate and farly usable. But we've
+This output is still quite accurate and fairly usable. But we've
already seen problem #1. Note that the file size has increased by a
factor of 100 compared to the original HTML. The PDF does have more
content, (firefox adds a header and footer for example), but nothing
looked great and printed just fine. And in that case, I probably would
have never even received a bug report.
-But there's a third problme that is the most pernicious, because it
-results in the final result looking ust awful. When cairo inserts the
+But there's a third problem that is the most pernicious, because it
+results in the final result looking just awful. When cairo inserts the
full-page fallback into the final PostScript file, it is inserting it
at 300dpi, but it does that only after rendering it to an intermediate
72dpi image, which is then scaled up. That's why the final PostScript
mailing list over the past couple of days, beginning here:
[Bug with fallback resolution of
-groups](href="http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2008-May/014169.html)
+groups](http://lists.cairographics.org/archives/cairo/2008-May/014169.html)
In that series of posts I coded a minimal test case in cairo's test
suite for the resolution problem, and a patch that fixes that test
case. But when I use a patched cairo for the PDF to PostScript
conversion of the file described here, I end up with the following
-result: [[bug-patched-cairo.ps">bug-patched-cairo.ps]].
+result: [[bug-patched-cairo.ps]].
Here, there's still a giant, full-page fallback image, (this is
expected since I haven't touched poppler yet). And the image is at
file). However, the original HTML table is now entirely missing. So
there's definitely something wrong with my patch.
-I'll continue to chase these bugs down, and continue my quest to get
-high-quality display and print output from cairo-using
-applications. It can be a difficult goal, but it's also a lot of fun
-and very rewarding.
-
-Please feel free to jump in and help if you're interested.
+I'll continue to chase these bugs down. The interesting thing about
+this chain is that it's only as strong as its weakest link. Fixing any
+of the individual problems here will make the end-to-end behavior be
+quite acceptable.
+And I'll continue my quest to get high-quality display and print
+output from cairo-using applications. It can be a challenging goal,
+but it's also a lot of fun and very rewarding. Please feel free to
+jump in and help if you're interested.