Cairo is an open source library which performs 2D graphics rendering on multiple output devices. In Rogue Wave Views, Cairo draws using the XRender extension, taking advantage of display hardware acceleration when available. It comes with interesting features such as transparency, anti-aliasing and gradients. For more information about Cairo, see http://www.cairographics.org.

To use Cairo in Rogue Wave Views, you must comply with the following requirements:

The required libraries can be complied by downloading tarballs for XRender, Cairo, and each of its dependencies from the Internet.

Rogue Wave Views supports the Cairo 1.10 release. Rogue Wave Views applications can use Cairo on every supported X Window platform.

Rogue Wave Views uses dynamic library loading to enable applications to draw using Cairo, even if they are statically linked. At runtime, an application will perform the following steps:

If one of these steps fails, the application will not be able to draw using Cairo.

When Cairo is correctly set up, Rogue Wave Views provides its benefits through a dedicated API to the IlvPalette, IlvPort, and IlvDisplay classes. The following methods have been added to handle transparency, anti-aliasing, and gradients:

See also sections Alpha Value, Anti-Aliasing Mode, and IlvGradientPattern class.