[cairo-announce] cairo snapshot 0.1.20 released

[cworth at east.isi.edu]

David Reveman has just committed a pile of interesting code, (ooh! the
gradients are pretty), to cairo which makes it high time for a new
snapshot.

We haven't had a very formal process for releasing new snapshots, so
since the announcement of 0.1.17 we had pushed out 0.1.18 without an
announcement, and at some point we incremented to 0.1.19 without
generating a tar file.

Oops.

I just put some notes together in cairo/RELEASING to help remind myself,
(or anyone else for that matter), what needs to be done to release a
snapshot, so hopefully we'll be more on top of things in the future.

In the meantime, you get 3 chunks of release notes for the price of one.

Enjoy,

-Carl


Snapshot 0.1.20 (2004-04-06 Carl Worth <cworth at isi.edu>)
========================================================
New pattern API
---------------
David Reveman has contributed a new pattern API which enable linear
and radial gradient patterns in addition to the original surface-based
patterns. The significant new top-level functions are:

	cairo_pattern_create_linear
	cairo_pattern_create_radial
	cairo_pattern_create_for_surface
	cairo_pattern_add_color_stop
	cairo_set_pattern

Any code using the old cairo_set_pattern, (which accepted a
cairo_surface_t rather than a cairo_pattern_t), will need to be
updated.

Update to XCB backend
---------------------
The XCB backend is now enabled by default, (use ./configure
--disable-xcb to turn it off).

Faster clipping
---------------
Graydon Hoare has added optimizations that make cairo_clip much faster
when the path is a pixel-aligned, rectangular region.

Bug fixes.

Snapshot 0.1.19 (2004-02-24 Carl Worth <cworth at isi.edu>)
========================================================
New PNG backend
---------------
Olivier Andrieu contributed a new PNG backend. It builds on the
existing image backend to make it easy to render "directly" to a
.png file. The user never needs to deal with the actual image
buffer. The significant new functions are:

	cairo_set_target_png
	cairo_png_surface_create

The PNG backend is not enabled by default so that by default there is
not a new dependency on libpng. Use ./configure --enable-png to enable
this backend.

Snapshot 0.1.18 (2004-02-17 Carl Worth <cworth at isi.edu>)
========================================================
Path query functionality
------------------------
It's now possible to query the current path. The two new functions
are:

	cairo_current_path
	cairo_current_path_flat

Each function accepts a number of callback functions that will be
called for each element in the path (move_to, line_to, curve_to,
close_path). The cairo_current_path_flat function does not accept a
curve_to callback. Instead, all curved portions of the path will be
converted to line segments, (within the current tolerance value). This
can be handy for doing things like text-on-path without having to
manually interpolate bezier splines.

New XCB backend
---------------
Jamey Sharp has contributed a second X backend that uses the new, lean
XCB library rather than Xlib. It cannot currently be compiled at the
same time as the Xlib backend. See ./configure --enable-xcb.

Build fixes for cygwin.

Bug fixes.