NEWS: take two.

NEWS

@@ -1,12 +1,12 @@
 Snapshot 1.9.8 (2010-06-12)
 ===========================
 
-   No API changes since the last snapshot, just a whole slew of bugs fixed and
-   inconsistencies eliminated. Far too many bugs fixed to individually
-   identify. We need to thank Benjamin Otte for his fantastic work on
-   the cairo-gl backend making it more faster and more robust, Andrea Canciani
-   for finding so many bugs and developing test cases for them, as well fixing
-   them. And last but not least we must all thank Adrian Johnson for
+   One major API changes since the last snapshot, and a whole slew of bugs
+   fixed and inconsistencies eliminated. Far too many bugs fixed to
+   individually identify. We need to thank Benjamin Otte for his fantastic
+   work on the cairo-gl backend making it faster and more robust, Andrea
+   Canciani for finding so many bugs and developing test cases for them, as
+   well fixing them. And last but not least we must all thank Adrian Johnson for
    continuing to eliminate bugs and improving the PostScript and PDF backends.
 
    This snapshot represents almost 4 months of bug fixing, bring Cairo to a
@@ -17,6 +17,75 @@ Snapshot 1.9.8 (2010-06-12)
    every other week leading to a 1.10 release with a target date of
    2010-08-16.
 
+API additions
+-------------
+  CAIRO_FORMAT_RGB16_565
+
+    16 bit devices still remain popular, and so with great demand,
+    CAIRO_FORMAT_RGB16_565 has been restored enabling applications to create
+    and use 16 bit images as sources and render targets.
+
+  cairo_surface_create_for_rectangle()
+
+    It is common practice to cut an image up into many smaller pieces and use
+    each of those as a source - a technique called texture atlasing.
+    cairo_surface_create_for_rectangle() extends Cairo to directly support use
+    these subregions of another cairo_surface_t both as a source and as a render
+    target.
+
+  cairo_region_create()
+  cairo_region_create_rectangle ()
+  cairo_region_create_rectangles ()
+  cairo_region_copy ()
+  cairo_region_reference ()
+  cairo_region_destroy ()
+  cairo_region_equal ()
+  cairo_region_status ()
+  cairo_region_get_extents ()
+  cairo_region_num_rectangles ()
+  cairo_region_get_rectangle ()
+  cairo_region_is_empty ()
+  cairo_region_contains_rectangle ()
+  cairo_region_contains_point ()
+  cairo_region_translate ()
+  cairo_region_subtract ()
+  cairo_region_subtract_rectangle ()
+  cairo_region_intersect ()
+  cairo_region_intersect_rectangle ()
+  cairo_region_union ()
+  cairo_region_union_rectangle ()
+
+    The Cairo region API was actually added a couple of snapshots ago, but we
+    forgot to mention it at the time. A simple API for the handling of
+    rectangular pixel-aligned regions by Soeren Sandmann.
+  
+
+Backend-specific improvements
+-----------------------------
+cairo-gl
+
+  Benjamin Otte made more than 300 commits in which he refactored the cairo-gl
+  backend, reducing a lot of code duplication and enabled him to begin working
+  on improving performance by reducing state changes and associated overhead.
+
+cairo-xlib
+
+  Access to the underlying connection to the Display is now thread-safe
+  enabling cairo-xlib to be used in a multi-threaded application without fear
+  of random corruption. Thanks Benjamin Otte!
+
+  cairo-xlib will now attempt to use PolyModeImprecise when compositing
+  trapezoids (i.e. a fill or a stroke operation with a non-trivial path) which
+  should allow hardware drivers more scope for accelerating the operation at
+  the cost of potentially incurring minute rendering errors. The mode can be
+  forced back to PolyModePrecise by setting the antialias parameter to
+  CAIRO_ANTIALIAS_SUBPIXEL.
+
+cairo-svg
+
+  A notable improvement was contributed by Alexander Shulgin to enable SVG to
+  reference external image through the use an extended MIME data type.
+
 Snapshot 1.9.6 (2010-02-19)
 ===========================
 API additions