Re: [Gzz] xupdf direction: please read

[Tuomas Lukka]

On Mon, Jan 06, 2003 at 01:59:29PM +0200, Tuomas Lukka wrote:
> I'm up against a very difficult decision w.r.t. xupdf direction before
> the HT03 article.
> 
> The question is whether to
> 
> 1) devote significant time and effort into making the handling of the large
> images practical at the necessary speeds; caching, lazy loading etc.
> 
>       - we need this anyway for photographs etc, but not quite
>         yet
>       - this is rather tricky, forcing to spend time tuning
>         memory management and caching algorithms
>       
> 
> 2) devote significant time and effort into rendering the PDF (or possibly
> some version made easier through hacking xpdf and writing semi-parsed
> output) by direct OpenGL commands, i.e. "render this textured rectangle
> here" for a single letter.
> 
>       - this might lower the performance or not; hard to say yet
>       - might be able to make good use of vertex shaders
>       - we want text rendering to be fast anyway
>       - might be quite tricky to get the images and fonts right;
>         OTOH might be easier than I think
> 
> As you can see, both have large pros and cons. So I'd like to ask for
> your opinions. The hardest is that I'm not at all sure which one
> will need greater effort and which one will be more useful.

Well, this seems to have been delayed at nongnu. I have now
decided to pursue alternative #1.

        Tuomas