Cairo (graphics)

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The correct title of this article is cairo (graphics). The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.


cairo
Maintainer:	Carl Worth
Stable release:	1.4.2 (19 March 2007) _[+/-]
Preview release:	1.3.16 (3 March 2007) _[+/-]
OS:	Cross-platform
Use:	Graphics library
License:	LGPL or MPL
Website:	cairographics.org

cairo is a free software graphics library with multiple backends that provides a vector based device-independent API for software developers. Currently, it has backends that support output to the X Window System, Win32 GDI, Quartz, the BeOS API, OpenGL contexts (via glitz), local image buffers, PNG files, PDF, PostScript and SVG files. 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, Smalltalk, Factor and several others.

1 History
2 Similar technologies
3 Notable usage
4 See also
5 References
6 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. The first syllable was based on the visual similarity between the letter X and the Greek letter Chi, and the second syllable was based on the similarity in pronunciation between the letter r and the Greek letter Rho (ρ).^[1]

[edit] Similar technologies

Cairo is intended to compete with similar technologies like WPF and GDI+ from Microsoft and Quartz from Apple Computer.

[edit] Notable usage

The Mono Project has been using Cairo since very early in conception, to power its backends of its GDI+ (libgdiplus) and System.Drawing namespaces.
Gecko 1.8, the layout engine for Mozilla Firefox 1.5 and SeaMonkey 1.0 web browsers, uses cairo to render SVG and <canvas> content.
Gecko 1.9, the future release of Gecko that will serve as the basis of Firefox 3.0, 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 February 22, 2006 on all major platforms, and later on other platforms.
GTK+, starting with version 2.8 released August 13, 2005, uses cairo to render the majority of its widgets.