cairo

From Encoresoup - The Ultimate Guide to Free/Open Source Software

In computing, cairo is a software library used to provide a vector graphics–based, device-independent API for software developers. Cairo is designed to provide primitives for 2-dimensional drawing across a number of different backends. Cairo is designed to use hardware acceleration when available.

Although written in C, there are bindings for using the cairo graphics library from many other programming languages, including C++, C#, Common Lisp, Haskell, Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, Scheme (Guile, Chicken), Smalltalk and several others.^[1] Dual licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Mozilla Public License, cairo is free software.

Contents 1 History 2 Backends 3 Similar technologies 4 Notable usage 4.1 Mozilla 4.2 WebKit 4.3 Poppler 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] History

The cairo project was founded by Keith Packard and Carl Worth for use in the X Window System. It was originally called Xr or Xr/Xc. The name was changed to emphasize the idea that it was a cross-platform library and not tied to the X server. The name "cairo" was derived from the original name Xr, similar to the Unicode ligature Chi Rho (☧).^[2]

[edit] Backends

Cairo supports output to a number of different backends. Backend support includes output to the X Window System, Win32 GDI, Mac OS X Quartz, the BeOS API, OS/2, OpenGL contexts (via glitz), local image buffers, PNG files, PDF, PostScript and SVG files.

[edit] Similar technologies

Cairo is intended to compete with similar technologies like WPF and GDI+ from Microsoft, Quartz 2D from Apple Inc, and Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG).

[edit] Notable usage

Cairo is popular among the open source community for providing cross-platform support for advanced 2D drawing.

GTK+, starting in 2005 with version 2.8, uses cairo to render the majority of its widgets.

The Mono Project has been using cairo since very early in conception, to power its backends of its GDI+ (libgdiplus) and System.Drawing namespaces.

[edit] Mozilla

The Mozilla project has made use of cairo in recent versions of its Gecko layout engine, used for rendering the graphical output of Mozilla products. Gecko 1.8, the layout engine for Mozilla Firefox 2.0 and SeaMonkey 1.0, uses cairo to render SVG and <canvas> content. Gecko 1.9, the future release of Gecko that will serve as the basis of Firefox 3, will use cairo as the graphics backend for rendering both web page content and the user interface (or "chrome"). Gecko 1.9 is currently in development, with the cairo-based version enabled in Firefox trunk builds starting 22 February 2006 on all major platforms, and later on other platforms.

[edit] WebKit

The WebKit framework uses Cairo for all rendering in the GTK+ port. Support has also been added for SVG and <canvas> content using Cairo.

[edit] Poppler

The Poppler library uses Cairo to render PDF documents. Cairo enables the drawing of antialiased vector graphics and transparent objects.

[edit] See also

• Display PostScript
• Cairo (operating system)

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Official website
• Cairo here, there and everywhere. Linux.Ars. Ars Technica.

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