*** Welcome to piglix ***

Cairo (software)

Cairo
Cairo banner 1.svg
Original author(s) Keith Packard, Carl Worth
Developer(s) Carl Worth, Behdad Esfahbod
Initial release Before 2003; 14 years ago (2003)
Stable release 1.15.6 (June 13, 2017; 17 days ago (2017-06-13))
Preview release
1.15.5
Repository https://cgit.freedesktop.org/cairo/, git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/cairo
Written in C
Type Graphics library
License GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 (only) or Mozilla Public License 1.1
Website www.cairographics.org

Cairo (stylized as cairo) is an open source programming library that provides a vector graphics-based, device-independent API for software developers. It provides primitives for two-dimensional drawing across a number of different back ends. Cairo uses hardware acceleration when available.

There is a formal proposal to standardize a C++ 2D graphics API based on a mechanical transformation of Cairo.

A library written in one programming language may be used in another language if bindings are written; Cairo has a range of bindings for various languages including C++, C# and other CLI languages, Delphi, Factor, Haskell, Lua, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Scheme, Smalltalk and several others.

Since Cairo is only a drawing library, it can be quite useful to integrate it with a graphical user interface toolkit.

Cairo supports output to a number of different back-ends, known as "surfaces" in its code. Back-ends support includes output to the X Window System, via both Xlib and XCB, Win32 GDI, OS X Quartz Compositor, the BeOS API, OS/2, OpenGL contexts (directly and via glitz), local image buffers, PNG files, PDF, PostScript, DirectFB and SVG files.


...
Wikipedia

...