[cairo] Is Cairo fo me?

Philip Schneider philip at pixologic.com
Tue Apr 16 10:13:50 PDT 2013


Just a little more info from my experience:

My use of Cairo on various platforms led me to using Cairo to create images, which are turned into OpenGL textures (done "manually", not using the Cairo OpenGL backend). OpenGL or OpenGL ES is used on platforms that support it. Even for FlasCC, the same idea is used, but of course Stage3D is used instead of OpenGL (yes, you read correctly - Cairo has been compiled and used successfully on iOS)

The various backends of Cairo can be used more directly, if they are a good fit for your application. It is easy to use Cairo as I have described, but perhaps it's not the first choice if one of Cairo's backends works for you (may be better performance in some cases, or easier to code?) I would investigate these backends before deciding to go with OpenGL, but still you might find OpenGL a good choice. Just investigate before :-) I've not really looked at the "Cairo OpenGL backend" to compare with what I'm doing, so I cannot comment on that detail.

-- Philip


On Apr 16, 2013, at 3:45 AM, Mohit Sindhwani <ml3p at onghu.com> wrote:

> Hi José,
> 
> I have used an older version of Cairo with a Windows Surface backend using the pre-compiled libraries from the Gtk for Windows project in a couple of internal projects using Borland C++ Developer Studio 2006.  This was a few years back but it worked fine.
> 
> More comments inline.
> 
> On 12/4/2013 10:22 PM, José Antonio Carmena wrote:
>> We are developing a powerful application with 2D graphics in OpenGL, but we have reached a point where lines and points are not enough. We need dashed thick lines, double or triple thick lines, drawing SVGs in OpenGL, filled complex polygons, etc. We tried to develop some of these functions without success.
> 
> I can't comment on using an OpenGL backend with Cairo because I have never tried it.  If you need it to be OpenGL enabled, I think someone else may have better inputs.
> 
>> We found Cairo and wonder if it would be a good choice. It should solve the problems I mentioned above, plus working under Linux, Mac and Windows, without any code modification.
> 
> "working under Linux, Mac and Windows"... well, the Cairo code may work but you'll still have to either use something cross-platform for the platform-specific surfaces, etc. or will need some platform specific code there anyway.
> 
>> Does Cairo meet these requirements?
> As a library alone, it would... not sure about the OpenGL part.
> 
>> By the way, now we are developing in Embarcadero (formerly Borland). Have you tried to use Cairo in that IDE?
> Are you using XE3?  Even XE3 will only give you Mac OS and Windows, not Linux.  I have not tried using Cairo under Firemonkey but now there's a thought!  You would still need a Mac to compile the MacOS executable.
> 
> Let me know how it turns out... this is something I'm also keen to see :)
> 
> Best Regards,
> Mohit.
> 
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