Re: Gtk && Xara

[John Cupitt <jcupitt gmail com>]

On 10/19/05, Dennis Morgan <dennis morgan xtra co nz> wrote:
> would it be just a lot better once Xara is ported... to just release widgets which can use xara?

Actually, I think it's simpler than this. My understanding is:

Cairo is a nice drawing API that GTK now uses to paint the display,
http://cairographics.org

Cairo can render drawing commands in many ways. It can use
hardware-accelerated OpenGL (via GLitz) (although this seems to be
non-functional at the moment), there's a X11 one, it can
software-render to an in-memory image buffer, it can generate PDF or
Postscript, it can render on win32  using gdi+ (someone is looking at
d3d), and on OS X with Quartz, and so on.

Xara sounds like it has a fast software renderer, so it could
potentially be useful as an alternative Cairo backend. You would not
need to touch GTK or any widgets.

But there are tricky licensing issues. Maybe the xara rendering engine
could be LGPLed? In any case, this is off-topic for app-devel. Maybe
the cairo list would be a better place.

(hope I've got this right, I've not been reading the cairo lists)