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:
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:
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
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 <cworth@cworth.org> and Keith Packard <keithp@keithp.com>. 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.