Re: Benefits of Cairo backend over Ghostscript for PDF

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le vendredi 17 mars 2023 à 22:57 +0100, Volodymyr Prokopyuk a écrit :

Hi,

What are the benefits of using Cairo backend for PDF generation in Lilypond compared to Ghostscript?

It is very advantageous from the internal point of view (much less code and more reliable code), but from the user point of view only:

• It's somewhat faster,

• You can have alpha transparency,

• You can generate SVG and PDF output in one go,

• I know you asked about PDF, but the SVG output is much better (it embeds the needed fonts).

Will the Cairo backend become the recorrended default backend for PDF generation or will Ghostscript remain as the default backend for Lilypond?

The idea is that at some point, the Cairo backend will become the default, then later, we'll remove the PostScript backend altogether. We're not yet there, though.

I can see that the size of the Cairo-generated PDF is around 3 times bigger compared to the same document generated with Ghostscript? Is there is way to reduce the size of the Cairo-generated PDF?

I don't know.

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