venividivici6/cairo

Multi-platform 2D graphics library

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 (via both Xlib and XCB), quartz, win32, and image buffers, as well as PDF, PostScript, and SVG file output. Experimental backends include OpenGL, BeOS, OS/2, and DirectFB.

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 include 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 versions of cairo can always be found at:

http://cairographics.org/download

Documentation on using cairo and frequently-asked questions:

http://cairographics.org/documentation
http://cairographics.org/FAQ

Mailing lists for contacting cairo users and developers:

http://cairographics.org/lists

Roadmap and unscheduled things to do, (please feel free to help out):

http://cairographics.org/roadmap
http://cairographics.org/todo

Dependencies

The set of libraries needed to compile cairo depends on which backends are enabled when cairo is configured. So look at the list below to determine which dependencies are needed for the backends of interest.

For the surface backends, we have both "supported" and "experimental" backends. Further, the supported backends can be divided into the "standard" backends which can be easily built on any platform, and the "platform" backends which depend on some underlying platform-specific system, (such as the X Window System or some other window system).

As an example, for a standard Linux build similar to what's shipped by your distro, (with image, png, pdf, PostScript, svg, and xlib surface backends, and the freetype font backend), the following sample commands will install necessary dependencies:

Debian (and similar):

apt-get build-dep cairo

Fedora (and similar):

yum install libpng-devel zlib-devel libXrender-devel fontconfig-devel

Technically you probably don't need pixman from the distribution since if you're manually compiling Cairo you probably want an updated pixman as well. However, if you follow the default settings and install pixman to /usr/local, your Cairo build should properly use it in preference to the system pixman.

Supported, "standard" surface backends

image backend (required)
------------------------
pixman >= 0.30.0	http://cairographics.org/releases

png support (can be left out if desired, but many
-----------  applications expect it to be present)
libpng			http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/libpng.html

pdf backend
-----------
zlib			http://www.gzip.org/zlib

postscript backend
------------------
zlib			http://www.gzip.org/zlib

svg backend
-----------
[none]

Supported, "platform" surface backends

xlib backend
------------
X11			http://freedesktop.org/Software/xlibs

xlib-xrender backend
--------------------
Xrender >= 0.6		http://freedesktop.org/Software/xlibs

quartz backend
--------------
MacOS X >= 10.5 with Xcode >= 3.0

win32 backend
-------------
Microsoft Windows 2000 or newer[*].

xcb backend
-----------
XCB			http://xcb.freedesktop.org

Font backends (required to have at least one)

freetype font backend
---------------------
freetype >= 2.1.9	http://freetype.org
fontconfig		http://fontconfig.org

quartz-font backend
-------------------
MacOS X >= 10.4 with Xcode >= 2.4

win32 font backend
------------------
Microsoft Windows 2000 or newer[*].

[*] 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 be done to get cairo running in those
    environments.

    Cairo can be compiled on Windows with either the gcc
    toolchain (see http://www.mingw.org) or with Microsoft
    Visual C++.  If the gcc toolchain is used, the standard
    build instructions using configure apply, (see INSTALL).
    If Visual C++ is desired, GNU make is required and
    Makefile.win32 can be used via 'make -f Makefile.win32'.
    The compiler, include paths, and library paths must be set
    up correctly in the environment.

    MSVC versions earlier than 7.1 are known to miscompile
    parts of cairo and pixman, and so should be avoided. MSVC
    7.1 or later, including the free Microsoft Visual Studio
    Express editions, produce correct code.

Experimental surface backends

beos backend
------------
No dependencies in itself other than an installed BeOS system, but cairo
requires a font backend. See the freetype dependency list.

os2 backend
-----------
Cairo should run on any recent version of OS/2 or eComStation, but it
requires a font backend. See the freetype dependency list. Ready to use
packages and developer dependencies are available at Netlabs:
			ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/cairo

skia backend
------------
Requires the skia library as of June 2014.  Since skia is not
API stable, building against newer (or older) versions of skia
will probably fail.

Compiling

See the INSTALL document for build instructions.

History

Cairo was originally developed by Carl Worth [email protected] and Keith Packard [email protected]. 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.