Hi Hazen: I have been testing the efficiency of text clipping for the cairo devices for a reasonably modern libcairo (version 1.6.4) and relatively modest 2.4GHz PC, and unlike older libcairo versions it is looking good.
Here is one example: softw...@raven> time c/x09c -dev pngcairo -drvopt text_clipping=0 -fam -fflen 2 -o cairotest%n.png real 0m0.391s user 0m0.360s sys 0m0.008s softw...@raven> time c/x09c -dev pngcairo -drvopt text_clipping=1 -fam -fflen 2 -o cairotest%n.png real 0m0.485s user 0m0.468s sys 0m0.012s There is a relatively large amount of text in that example (the contour labels), and also quite a bit of graphics. In fact it is that example that shows (on the first page) what happens if you don't have text clipped properly. But the total difference in elapsed time is trivial, just 0.094 seconds. Text clipping efficiency might conceivably make an important difference for a large test so I did the following (in the installed examples tree) to test that possibility: time ./plplot-test.sh --front-end=c --device=pngcairo with that script locally modified (or not) to use -drvopt text_clipping=1 The resulting times were (without text clipping) real 0m34.945s user 0m24.478s sys 0m0.304s and (with text clipping) real 0m38.174s user 0m27.194s sys 0m0.280s for a rather modest ~10 per cent change in elapsed time. >From the text_clipping=1 efficiency demonstrated by these tests I think it is a no-brainer to adopt text_clipping=1 by default so that correct text clipping is guaranteed for cairo devices unless the user specifically opts out (using -drvopt text_clipping=0). I have changed (revision 9774) cairo.c accordingly. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
