Steve, Darren Dale raised a question offline that I think will be of general interest to mpl devels, and that you are the person to answer: How do you see the future of a cairo backend as a prospective replacement for most or all of the primary mpl backends? What would need to be completed in cairo? Based on the cairo web page, I get the impression that quite a bit is still missing, including eps generation and genuine vector ps. But maybe the web page is just out of date. What would need to be done in mpl, and how hard would it be? Would mpl get slower if everything went through cairo? Any other considerations? Thanks. Eric