Cairo - Multi-platform 2D graphics library http://cairographics.org What is cairo ============= Cairo is a 2D graphics library with support for multiple output devices. Currently supported output targets include the X Window System, win32, and image buffers. Experimental backends include OpenGL (through glitz), Quartz, XCB, PostScript and PDF file output. Cairo is designed to produce consistent output on all output media while taking advantage of display hardware acceleration when available (for example, through the X Render Extension). The cairo API provides operations similar to the drawing operators of PostScript and PDF. Operations in cairo including stroking and filling cubic Bézier splines, transforming and compositing translucent images, and antialiased text rendering. All drawing operations can be transformed by any affine transformation (scale, rotation, shear, etc.). Cairo has been designed to let you draw anything you want in a modern 2D graphical user interface. At the same time, the cairo API has been designed to be as fun and easy to learn as possible. If you're not having fun while programming with cairo, then we have failed somewhere---let us know and we'll try to fix it next time around. Cairo is free software and is available to be redistributed and/or modified under the terms of either the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) version 2.1 or the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 1.1. Where to get more information about cairo ========================================= The primary source of information about cairo is: http://cairographics.org/ The latest releases of cairo can be found at: http://cairographics.org/releases Snapshots of in-development versions of cairo: http://cairographics.org/snapshots The programming manual for using cairo: http://cairographics.org/manual Mailing lists for contacting cairo users and developers: http://cairographics.org/lists Answers to some frequently asked questions about cairo: http://cairographics.org/FAQ Dependencies ============ The set of libraries needed to compile cairo depends on which backends are enabled when cairo is configured. Here are the dependencies for each backend: Surface backends: image backend ------------- no dependencies glitz backend ------------- glitz >= 0.4.4 http://freedesktop.org/Software/glitz pdf backend ----------- freetype >= 2.1.4 http://freetype.org zlib http://www.gzip.org/zlib postscript backend ------------------ freetype >= 2.1.4 http://freetype.org zlib http://www.gzip.org/zlib quartz backend -------------- [*] win32 backend ------------- [*] xcb backend ----------- XCB http://xcb.freedesktop.org xlib backend ------------ Xrender >= 0.6 http://freedesktop.org/Software/xlibs beos backend ------------ No dependencies in itself other than an installed BeOS system, but cairo requires a font backend. See the freetype dependency list. Font backends: freetype font backend --------------------- freetype >= 2.1.4 http://freetype.org fontconfig http://fontconfig.org win32 font backend ------------------ [*] atsui font backend ------------------ [*] [*] I don't know specifically what packages might need to be installed on a Mac OS X system to use the Quartz and ATSUI backends. As far as win32, the situation is rather complex: The Win32 backend should work on Windows 2000 and newer (excluding Windows Me.) Most testing has been done on Windows XP. While some portions of the code have been adapted to work on older versions of Windows, considerable work still needs to done to get cairo running in these environments. Cairo can be compiled on Windows either with the GCC toolchain (see http://www.mingw.org) or with Microsoft Visual C++. Makefiles or project files for compiling with MSVC are however not provided as of this release. We have received reports that MSVC 6.0 compiles parts of cairo incorrectly, (leading to incorrect color). MSVC 7.0 is known to work. Compiling ========= See the INSTALL document for build instructions. History ======= Cairo was originally developed by Carl Worth and Keith Packard . Many thanks are due to Lyle Ramshaw without whose patient help our ignorance would be much more apparent. Since the original development, many more people have contributed to cairo. See the AUTHORS files for as complete a list as we've been able to compile so far.