[cairo] Cario in Visual Basic

[Jelmer Baas]

Daniel,

Thanks for your reply. 

> Having said that, if you're looking for 
> the fastest way to draw lines in VB, cairo may not be what 
> you're looking for. Sure, it can draw lines quickly (and 
> likely fast enough for your purposes), but the focus here is 
> on a lot more than that. And that "a lot more"
> is probably going to interest you also.

It's not only about "the lines". I'll need to draw lines, text, use
colors, drag-'n-drop and much more. The problem is that I'm not even
completely aware about WHAT I'll need, but I'm sure that what I know
now, isn't half of it. Therefore I need more than a simple "draw a line"
control.

> Out of curiousity, where did you get the cairo dll? Here?
> 
> http://www.gimp.org/~tml/gimp/win32/downloads.html

No, I downloaded it from
http://gladewin32.sourceforge.net/modules/news/, which is the link from
the cairo site (which is, on a side note, a great place to get lost ...)
 
> Notice that what you get from the above link isn't an ActiveX 
> dll, which is what VB needs to interface with cairo nicely. 
> The cairo dll just has plain old C functions, so you can 
> either interface with it like you would the Win32 API 
> (declare each function/structure you use etc), or you can go 
> through the effort of creating a ActiveX DLL that wraps 
> cairo's functionality in nice COM objects. To do that last 
> approach would require quite a bit of work, but the result 
> would be pretty cool, and I think you'd make a number of 
> windows developers happy.

My idea is to write a simple module which gives a VB programmer access
to all the functions. Shouldn't be that hard, just a lot of work.

Only thing I haven't figured out is how to create the "cairo_t" object
in VB ... Oh, and ofcourse try to understand the LGPL license, which is
even harder for me...


Jonathan: thanks for the link, I'll check that out, too.

-- 
Jelmer