Replace cairo

[oz123]

I know it's a bit ambitious... but cairo does more than PDF, and that what makes it so complex and awesome. Maybe for WeasyPrint a small specialized library is enough?

https://github.com/rk700/PyMuPDF

[liZe]

This library looks cool, but it seems to be a PDF reader, not a PDF writer 😄.

It could be useful to solve #52 but it's released under GPL just like Poppler.

[oz123]

You can definitely write PDF with MuPDF. Just the Python Binding wraps only the view functions.

[oz123]

There is also https://github.com/pmaupin/pdfrw which is pure Python. The author says the following:

pdfrw will faithfully reproduce vector formats without rasterization, so the rst2pdf package has used pdfrw for PDF and SVG images by default since March 2010.

[oz123]

One more interesting option which I could suggest is to reap off the matplotlib.backend_pdf for using as the basic canvas.
The code is really neat to look at, and I have been fooling around with to create A4 pages with text on them.

I am willing to collaborate on this too.

as a side note, I took over the maintenance of rst2pdf, which share a lot of functionality through xhtml2pdf with weasyprint, css parsing and other stuff for sure. Maybe some things can be joint projects.

[stuaxo]

Changing itself cairo to split up it's backends could be fruitful (so you could install cairo, but only the pdf backend).

As mentioned in the #841 you then have Pango with its dependencies, and may want to do something similar there.

[liZe]

A lot of work has been done in the pydyf branch to remove Cairo, we’ll discuss this topic in #1232!

[liZe]

It’s done!