[cairo] building a "tiny" libcairo for embedded system?

Carl Worth cworth at cworth.org
Wed Feb 1 12:25:41 PST 2006


On Mon, 30 Jan 2006 21:35:23 -0800, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
> On 1/30/06, David Young <dyoung at pobox.com> wrote:
> > Does anyone have a recipe for building a tiny libcairo, suitable for an
> > embedded system with a tight ROM/RAM budget---e.g., 8/16MB?
> 
> As long as you don't plan on rendering text using cairo, the simplest
> way would probably be to create a dummy/null font backend
> implementation.  Such a thing would probably be useful to have in
> cairo itself (right now it requires that you enable at least one font
> backend).

Yes, you could do cairo minus text, but then you're left with a fairly
non-functional library in the end.

What might be more interesting is to have a tiny font builtin to cairo
with no external library dependency. Keith did work in his Twin
project in which he grabbed the Hershey glyphs:

	http://keithp.com/blog/twin/text.html

and then modified them by adding some curves:

	http://keithp.com/blog/twin/newglyphs.html

The final result is a reasonably good-looking font, but something that
requires so little storage that it might be reasonable to bundle it
inside of cairo.

What would still need to be done would be to write a "font backend"
which would basically be just a bit of cairo code to render gylphs
from Keith's modified Hershey paths.

If someone is interested in that, I'm sure Keith would offer some more
detailed pointers to where the actual path data now lives.

-Carl
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