On Fri, 2022-12-30 at 13:08 +0100, Jean Abou Samra wrote: > > I am not at all convinced by these workarounds just to get Cairo a > > bit earlier and avoid walking the proper road to the clean solution > > (ie properly deprecating what we don't want to or cannot support). > > \postscript can be deprecated on other grounds, but we cannot > really deprecate \epsfile without an offering an alternative, > which means figuring out how to do PNGs via the default PS > backend and GS.
Yes, I agree. > I'm not really eager to do that, TBH. > > > I think this is a bad limitation, and adding more dependencies into > > the mix doesn't make it more appealing. > > As I said, I don't see obvious use cases for \epsfile where you > really need vector graphics. LilyPond provides markup commands > for that. Ok, in that case we can properly deprecate this once we have an alternative (see above). I still think losing the ability to include (external) vector graphics is a loss, though. > > With Cairo, I am not aware of benefits for our users, it is more > > motivated by internal maintenance considerations - please correct > > me if I'm wrong. > > - SVG rendering is *way* faster. > > - It also embeds fonts, so the generated SVG files are device- > independent. Ok, this is SVG which we can probably agree that the backend is in a bad state. At some point, there was a discussion on making Cairo the default for producing SVGs but IIRC it faded out with the lack of support for output-attributes, ie https://gitlab.com/lilypond/lilypond/-/issues/6503 Once that is solved, only enabling Cairo by default for SVGs may be a separate discussion that is worth having. > - PDF rendering is a little faster. > > - It does not use a subprocess, which makes it easier to sandbox it > (cf. the problem with LilyPond on GitHub actions that was > discussed some time ago on this list). > (OK, this is defeated by the "workaround" as you noticed.) Both actually, right? > - It makes it easier for developers to add certain features > that would be harder to support in the current backends, > like PNG, which benefit users in the end. "Developer happiness" is hard to sell to users unless it results in immediate benefits; I don't think it's a convincing argument at the moment.
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