GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2010 Inkscape

Cairo rendering for Inkscape

by Krzysztof KosiƄski for Inkscape

Inkscape uses its own rendering library, called libnr, when rendering graphics on the screen and exporting bitmaps. This library is slow, single-threaded and does not have any hardware acceleration. This proposal is about converting Inkscape's rendering subsystem to Cairo. Using the hardware-accelerated cairo-gl backend and OpenCL-based filters will be investigated. The goal is to substantially improve rendering performance, so that very complex drawings can be edited easily.