World: r3wp

You're confusing me ...

that's what QT GTK+ WXWindows does

so things like super posing the regular widget properties of a VID 
face and some specific draw of  another specific rendering engine

but i can be wrong the cairo context is maybe just a transparent 
back grounded abstracted widget you can clip to any face

I'm less concerned about coolness then an appropriate license and 
functionality of an up to date graphics library

on a fonctionnality ground cairo have good point

it embed an SVG engine ( even if i'm sure a rebol / agg one blast 
it ) support of freefonts  support of png (but only this image format 
where rebol works with jpg etc...)

but you have an image surface ... wher you can clip any rvb content 
... even opengl buffer ?

i mean you can trop opengl rendering in a file why not traping it 
to a image buffer and then display it

the idea of rendering postscript or PDF is very appealing to me

i think cairo can be fun  but then the question is always the same 
will the dialect build to interface it with rebol will cover the 
whole thing or just cover the ground capabilities

i like the path thing in cairo ...

the difference is that we now have the host kit so it can be extended

that make me think are bezier curves like thing  you set a curve 
shape and you can draw anything to shape it

using the  cairo path layer you can imagine multi layer drawing  
something like photoshop's "calques" (sorry it's french lets say 
masks)

but why doing multi layer well to determine an order of was is  on 
top of what when rendering

having multi layers means you can then  multi thread the rendering 
1 layer per thread  this will enhance the complexity of what we can 
display on screen  (think about rendering a webpage or a pdf document 
for example)

When are we getting multithreading??

never and even more after  probably

carl said multi thread multi pipe multi core sux for a scripted language 
async process is better

well in fact we had this discution like 10 years before multi core 
have become the majority of the now in days personal computers

async is not going to help get better rendering of multiple layers 
concurrently

well the fact is cpu are multi threaded multi cored and so are the 
graphic cards when you render a document  with AGG only that the 
freaking CPU that does the whole rendering work for God's sakes, 
it's like the computing on the 90's ... ok it's passed it's done 
it's deprecated and over now we have 650MHz GPU multi rendering pipelined 
and  multi threaded multi cored CPU over 2GHZ per core that's a lot 
of power and why would rebol be the only one not exploiting that 
... And in the near futur (5 years to come) the GPU and CPU will 
be merged in a single chip high performance.

Just run a new instance of rebol for each core :)

....  becarefull there's a wolf in my name and those jokes it really 
don't make fun of them :)

That's what Cheyenne does .. multiple helper processes

yeah but i'm  poor brained ...  i like easy to understand concepts 
when it's too much  bricolage like that's make me run

bricolage another french word ... well who cares...

So, if you created a rendering surface or whatever in Cairo, can 
you then ask another Rebol process to access it?

the real true ask is rebol is slow to evolve so does cairo will evolve 
betwin 2 rebol release or does it will go to abandonedwar after 2 
years  ?

graham i fear the context concept is like the flash plugin in your 
page ... you see what i mean

so the memory is protected from access by other processes?

you have a specific area where you have your flash rendering embeded 
more or less into a  visual content rendered using a completly different 
engine and drawing method

end  betwing those 2 engines no coabitation the flash space is for 
flash only

and that's more or less the phylosophy that doesn't feat rebol ...

Doesn't the graphics library access the multi-cored gpu?

was i more clear with that example (taht's the way GTK+ and QT link 
with opengl you have a specific squared area to clip your opengl 
rendering in  but  it's not mixed content

Graham in recent video card the GDI stack is not the most optimised 

they pushed walls to allow new things like the blu ray decoding to 
have a room and that have obviously an impact on the previous guys 
there and DX11 ...MicroSoft tod the whole word that GDI rendering 
was dead and that the only thing that matters was DX 11 rendering 
even for their widgets and desktop everyday rendering (aero)

let imagine you do a button you want to draw something on the background 
with AGG and then have the regular button borders and fonts to be 
applyed over  using AGG it's possible to have that effect  with the 
context phylosophy the VID button is a separated entity from the 
agg entity  you have the QT context the QT widgets display in it 
and the AGG widget is one of the few widgets you have but you can't 
mixe content ...

I imagine we could have multiple graphics libraries loaded at the 
same time ...

So, one could use AGG for somethings like a GUI and then use Cairo 
for display postscript

yeah ... but cairo doesn't seems bad at all

Ultimately it will depend on whoever does these things :)

don't look at me that way ....

Which library best supports rich text in an area field?

i would say  cairo isn't bad

hum cairo glyph api is linked to pango ?

depend the quality speed dans complexity of the rendering you want 
in fact

text is  a pain to handle that's why pango was created to serv the 
gilmp tool kit (GTK)

Function overloading (having a several variants of a function with 
the same name and different arguments) is a language feature available 
in many languages but not in C.