[fitz-dev] Comparison with Fresco

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sat, Mar 15, 2003 at 10:43:16PM -0800, M. Evans wrote:
> 
> Please elaborate on differences between the goals of Fitz and
> those of Fresco.  Fresco employs scene graphs with attention
> to efficiency issues for UIs, anti-aliased vector graphics
> and text, multiple back-ends (printed or screen), arbitrary
> transformations, transparency, blending, event dispatch, etc.

Fitz and Fresco have radically different goals, at least as I
understand Fitz.  Fresco aims to provide a GUI system; Fitz aims to
provide a rendering library.  It would be entirely reasonable for
Fresco to adopt Fitz for rendering; we already use LibArt as a
rendering backend, and there are obvious parallels between the Fitz
display tree and the Fresco scene graph that could be exploited to
make the fit even tighter.

Fresco itself contains no anti-aliasing support, no alpha composition
support (IIRC), etc.; we simply use the capabilities of
LibArt/GGI/openGL.  We also don't worry about efficiency nearly as
much as Fitz, though IMO there are a few major architectural changes
needed that may change that.

> >From what I can tell Fresco basically operates at a higher level
> than Fitz in that it doesn't discriminate in what back ends it
> is willing to support, whereas Fitz is focused on PDF.  I would
> appreciate hearing your thoughts.

Fitz has the goal of _rendering_ PS/PDF; that's totally different from
rendering _to_ PDF, which seems to be what you're talking about here.

But I'm not going to try to sort out such misunderstandings; your
previous behaviour on fresco-devel has left me sufficiently convinced
that such attempts are a waste of time.

Cheers,
-- Nathaniel

-- 
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