| Developer(s) | Carl Worth, Behdad Esfahbod |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 1.10.2 (25 Dec 2010) [±] |
| Preview release | [±] |
| Written in | C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | Graphics library |
| License | GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 (only) or Mozilla Public License 1.1 |
| Website | http://cairographics.org/ |
cairo is a software library used to provide a vector graphics-based, device-independent API for software developers. It is designed to provide primitives for 2-dimensional drawing across a number of different backends. Cairo is designed to use hardware acceleration[1] when available.
Although written in C, there are bindings for using the cairo graphics library from many other programming languages, including C++, PHP, Factor, Haskell, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk and several others.[2] Cairo is free software. The majority of it is Dual licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Mozilla Public License, though some parts of it are licensed only under the GNU General Public License.
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The cairo project was founded by Keith Packard and Carl Worth for use in the X Window System.[3] 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.[4] The name cairo was derived from the original name Xr, similar to the Greek letters chi and rho.[5]
Cairo supports output to a number of different backends, known as "surfaces" in its code. Backend support includes output to the X Window System, Win32 GDI, Mac OS X Quartz, the BeOS API, OS/2, OpenGL contexts (directly[6] and via glitz), local image buffers, PNG files, PDF, PostScript, DirectFB and SVG files. There are other backends in development targeting the graphics APIs OpenVG,[7] Qt,[8] Skia,[9] and Windows' Direct2D.[10]
Cairo has been compared to similar technologies like WPF and GDI+ from Microsoft, Quartz 2D from Apple Inc, and Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG).
Cairo is popular in the open source community for providing cross-platform support for advanced 2D drawing.
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