Re: Rethinking the design of xwidgets

[Basil L. Contovounesios]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

>> From: Akira Kyle <ak@akirakyle.com>
>> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
>> Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2020 11:05:51 -0600
>> 
>> Another use case I had in mind for my proposed improved xwidgets 
>> is better pdf rendering. I use pdf-tools constantly and it's one 
>> of the best pdf viewers out there (not just because it's in 
>> emacs). I'll sometimes even use it to give presentations so I 
>> never have to leave Emacs. However it's design inherently limits 
>> its rendering performance as it must rasterize each pdf page in a 
>> separate process then pipe that data to emacs to display as an 
>> image.
>
> This use case doesn't necessarily call for the same solution, but I
> could think of a differently designed pdf-viewer that didn't need to
> rasterize each page separately.  Again, the mouse-sensitivity feature
> of our image display could perhaps be used for something like that.  I
> reckon the hardest problem is to find an engine, be it a library or a
> program, that could convert PDF into something Emacs can display.

Not sure if this fits the bill, but I was hoping to eventually look into
whether Emacs+Cairo could render PDFs using the GLib API of the GPLed
Poppler library.

-- 
Basil