[cairo] Is Cairo Library an X Window Component or not?

[Mihai Moldovan]

* On 3/27/23 07:45, Виктор Михайлов wrote:
> I know Cairo's strong feature is a high quality antialiasing and even
> subpixel rendering when drawing lines, curves and text output. Is
> there antialiasing and subpixel rendering of approximately the same
> quality in X.org itself?
> [...]
> I mean the situation when X.org makes drawing
> with its own primitives (lines, rectangles, arcs, curves etc.). Does
> X.org Server draw these primitives itself with antaliasing and
> subpixel rendering of reasonable quality, or their quality leaves much
> to be desired - it's low by modern standards and it's impossible to
> fix it?

In short: not really. Plain X does only support very basic antialiasing via the
XRENDER extension, all other drawing primitives do not support any antialiasing
at all, as far as I remember. Instead of adding such things to the core server,
cairo (for general drawing) and pango (for font drawing) have been invented.
These libraries draw on surfaces that are opaque to the X server itself (they
are, essentially, just pixel buffers). They also make porting applications (and
libraries) a lot easier.



Mihai
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