Cairo (graphics) Article Index for
Cairo
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Cairo
 

Information About

Cairo (graphics)




  Logo <br/>
  Developer Carl Worth
  Latest Release Version 104
  Latest Release Date March 15 , 2006
  Operating System Cross-platform
  Genre Graphics library
  License LGPL or MPL
  Website cairographicsorg


Cairo is a Free Software graphics library with multiple backends that provides a vector-based device-independent API for Software Developer s. Currently, it has backends that support output to the X Window System , Win32 , the BeOS API, OpenGL contexts (via Glitz ), local image buffers and PNG files. Future backends are planned that will support output to 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++ , Haskell , Java , Python , Perl , Ruby , and several others .

Cairo was started 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).

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


NOTABLE USAGE


  • 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 Windows and soon on other platforms.




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