Cairo: Multi-platform 2D graphics library

https://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.

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 its website:

• https://cairographics.org

The latest versions of cairo can always be found at:

• https://cairographics.org/download

Documentation on using cairo and frequently-asked questions:

• https://cairographics.org/documentation
• https://cairographics.org/FAQ

Mailing lists for contacting cairo users and developers:

• https://cairographics.org/lists

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

• https://cairographics.org/roadmap
• https://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):

  • dnf builddep cairo

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

PNG support (preferred)

• libpng

PDF backend

• zlib

PostScript backend

• zlib

SVG backend

• none

Supported, "platform" surface backends

Xlib backend

• X11

xlib-xrender backend

• Xrender >= 0.6

Quartz backend

• macOS >= 10.4 with Xcode >= 2.5

Windows backend

• Microsoft Windows Vista or newer.

XCB backend

• XCB

Font backends (required)

freetype font backend

• freetype >= 2.1.9
• fontconfig

Quartz-font backend

• MacOS X >= 10.4 with Xcode >= 2.5

Windows GDI font backend

• Microsoft Windows 2000 or newer

Windows DirectWrite font backend

• Microsoft Windows 7 or newer

Compiling

See the INSTALL document for build instructions.

Licensing

Cairo is released under the terms of either the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1, or the terms of the Mozilla Public License version 1.1.

See the COPYING document for more information.

History

Cairo was originally developed by Carl Worth cworth@cworth.org and Keith Packard keithp@keithp.com. 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 document for as complete a list as we've been able to compile so far.