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GTK+ to Use Cairo Vector Engine
Eugenia writes "GTK+ is now the first major toolkit to have added support for the Cairo 2D vector graphics library, which is designed to provide high-quality display and print output. GTK+ project leader Owen Taylor has commented on the X/GTK integration of Cairo. To put it in perspective, Cairo is similar to OSX's Quartz engine and Longhorn's Avalon (PPT analysis). The 3D hardware accelerated image compositing OpenGL part of Cairo will be provided by the Glitz library. Cairo is 'possible' to be part of Qt 4.x at a later date, according to Trolltech's Qt 4 technical preview document."
One thing should be noted, is, OSX aqua quartz isn't vector based it is still bitmapped, as many people are under the apprehension that it is all vector when it is just good bitmaps.
it is live compositing like postscript on screen but it is not yet vector.
the best mac community on the web
Now if we had some sort of open source 3D drivers to take advantage of this . Sure we have ATI and Nvidia binary drivers, but the uncertanties in the licensing pretty much keeps them from getting bundled in most distributions.
Oh well, at least it's a start to get some OS X-like eye candy.
It's 1992 all over again.
Have a browse around Direct Rendering Open Source Project for details of video cards with open source 3D drivers.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Actually, mono is currently using cairo a lot. In fact, their new Windows.Forms is switching to a native implementation. System.Drawing uses cairo. This implies gtk# as well. :D
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
when all the wanto-lick eye candy comes in bitmaps for OS X?
I know vector based GUI may reduce file sizes but to the cost of performance? I mean bitmap = load and display, vector = load and process then display not to mention that windows can be resized, be transparent, transform (maybe) and all of this needs CPU power. This is not counting that if it is done right then we all want a piece of it.
The tendency nowadays is to make files smaller and smaller which requires more and more processing power. When will we stick to something that has good speed and then just make it look good? Of course generally speaking. It's like always buying the latest processor chip, the biggest hard drive and the super thin and large monitor. There is always a faster one, bigger one, smaller... Whe do we stop to make something good out of what we have and then move to the next step??
No I didn't RTFA
No I will not fix your super computer
No I don't care about drivers being bundled with linux or not
Your bitmap are belong to us... got it?
Man I can't sleep!!!!
Have a good one. Have a good one.
===== "Every head is a different world so don't invade mine you FREAK!" smartSAGA said
I have a better idea: let's shed some light on the apocryphs used in the story. Seriously, I had hard time to hunt all of those definitions. Here's a handy list of links for anyone who is not up to date with "ppd," "glitz" and other bloody-edge jargon:
- GTK+ *
- Cairo *
- X *
- X/GTK *
- OSX *
- Quartz *
- Longhorn *
- Avalon *
- PPT *
- 3D *
- OpenGL *
- Glitz *
- Qt *
- Trolltech *
I hope it helps. (Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 20.2).)What's your definition of "out"? From the Cairo download page, "Cairo is still under active development. The API is rapidly approaching stability, but is not quite there yet, so there is not yet any official "release" of cairo." So, Cairo is not a 1.0 release, or even a .01 release. Dev snapshots are available, in an unstable form (the API is "approaching" stability). How does this differ from the available technology preview of Avalon (aside from the openness of the source, of course)?
Both are still in pre-release stages. Both are available in a publicly-consumable form even though they've not reached API stability yet. Declaring one or the other the "winner" is still premature.
Oh, yeah, and Avalon will be available on XP and 2k3, not just Longhorn.
... Assuming (even cheap) OpenGL hardware. Like you say, the description is smaller. It is the description you are sending the GPU, be it triangles or pixels. That is where your bottlneck lies. GPUs are designed to process these triangles and and they do it FAST.
it looks like a nice feature, which will be good, for both gtk and qt. looking at the Cairo site, it looks to serve a purpose similar to SVG, which used to be the big buzzword.
can anyone tell us, is Cairo in direct competition with SVG applications? i notice cairo advertises "high quality...printing outputs" - is that its focus while SVG deals more with graphic displays and the web?
This is a big step forward. Something I've waited for a long time. If it is possible to unite all those vector-graphics efforts in cairo more time can be spent on "stuff that matters".
Well, I always hoped X11 would do this step but they seem to enjoy doing politics instead of standards... On the other hand this approach has some unique advantages:
Interesting is, that there are also java-bindings that work together with SWT which is an interesting step (mono is already on board -- see previous comments)
So hopefully the time of ugly graphics in platform-independent OpenSource-Software is finally over... (just watch OpenOffice -- uaaahh)
Well, a last wish: If Qt guys come aboard, this means KDE is in which on the other hand means that gnome and KDE join on the same backend... just dreaming...
A new X.org release comes out every 6 months.
Currently Linux desktops ALREADY HAVE vector based graphics.
The icons are vector for instance. Some simple games like Gnome's solitare version (the command is sol) is vector based. And this has been for a year now or so.
Gnome 2.8 I know has vector based graphics, because I use it everyday. I think that 2.6 had it a bit for applications. Icons and such have been vector based for a long time now.
So 50% of the new stuff that Longhorn promises, we already have. Longhorn isn't due out for another year or two, and it's going to take another year to two to start to get popular (based on history from Win98 and WinME and the time it took for WinXP to get popular over those).
So X.org and Freedesktop.org and the Gnome and KDE people have between 3 and 5 years to surpass Longhorn in Gui-sexy-ness. Then as far as looks go Linux should be pretty freaking capable.
X Windows has other benifits, too, that go far beyond what OS X or Windows will ever be able to do. And if Linux folks are able to extend on those current capabilities we will see new things that nobody would think much about.
Say your at your office. Your working on your word proccessor, but your building gets hit by electrical outage and your computer dies, but other computers are OK.
You haven't saved any of your information or work, but that's ok because your application is still running fine on a central X application server, so you go to a different workstation and open up your word proccessor and it's like nothing never happenned. Everything is just as you left it.
Say your setting up a presentation. You open up your OO.org and start a power-point-like presentation. You have to take off to go use the restroom and so your partner will finish up before the meeting starts. So you drag and drop your current applicaton to his desktop and you close your laptop and run off for a powder.
Stuff like that. That's the future potential power of X Windows network transparency.
You can already acheive it in a limited way with Sun's X terminals, and other software, but X.org hasn't yet gotten to that point. They are working on it now though.
... what was wrong with bitmaps? If your icons are large enough that you need vector icons... they're way way too damn big.
> "GTK+ is now the first major toolkit to have added
/ gn ustep/core/back/Source/cairo/
> support for the Cairo 2D vector graphics library"
http://savannah.gnu.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs/gnustep
6 months later....
did someone actually read the _20 lines_ post made by Owen Taylor? He just commited gtk dependancy on cairo in the cvs repository, but that's all. Nothing's working on Cairo yet, not even font support.
I'm really not a fan of Windows, but they've been showing Avalon demos for a while now, so could you please at least wait for the Gtk team to reach a similar level before comparing their work to Microsoft's one, or Apple's(!)?
Now, if we are to speak about the possibilities offered by such technologies, I'd like to know your opinion on the topic guys.
I don't think Cairo necessarily means things will suddenly start to look better, but they don't necessarily have to. GTK+ apps already look pretty good with a decent theme. It's sufficient if apps continue to look the way they do, and see a performance boost. In fact, I think I'd rather see than than fancier graphics and no speed improvements.
Then again: I urge caution--supposing Microsoft has already patented such things in Longhorn? The F/OSS community could be in serious trouble...
Not in europe... we're never gonna have software patents.
It's been a while, I could use a whole article devoted to generating a KDE v Gnome flamewar. It's the weekend - entertain me!
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Well, okay then: the
But somehow, I don't think just one article quite captures the subtleties of the debate?
gcj and GNU Classpath have been using cairo for well over a year now in order to implement the Java2D API.
Canopy is also a major stakeholder in the SCO group
[...]
Do a little research and you'll find that Trolltech is going to answer any questions you may have regarding their connection to the Canopy Group, their board of directors, and the connections between same with a bland "no comment."
Well, Trolltech is not really secretive about their investors. Do a little research and you'll find this site. Out of the 9 parties and groups listed there, Canopy is number 7 and SCO number 9, with a combined share of about 5%. Now if you want to call that major... To me it would seem that Trolltech is majorly owned by it's employes.
With a little more research you even might find for axample this interview with the Trolltech President, where he talks about the Canopy investment:
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PF: Somebody mentioned that the Canopy Group & SCO owns some parts of Trolltech.
ME: Sorry, we don't have any influence on them.
PF: Do they have any influence on you?
ME: Not really. They have a 5.7% stake in Trolltech. Historically Canopy became an investor because we cooperated with Caldera. As you might know we made and delivered the graphic install, which was the first graphical install for Linux, for Caldera Linux. The Canopy Group as the main investor in Caldera was so impressed by the work we had done that they wanted to invest in Trolltech, to make sure that Trolltech could become a solid company that could continue to deliver software to the Linux community. It's pretty ironic to see what has happened historically after that of course. But they don't have any influence on Trolltech. Trolltech is employee-owned, 65% of the shares are owned by the employees and we control the business so they have a small stake in us and that is it.
PF: You haven't talk about this complicated with SCO on Linux
EE: The patent issue or the corporate issue?
PF: The thing that SCO is asking and preparing to sue everybody about some code they pretend they own in Linux.
EE: I can tell you that we do not support these actions from SCO. Trolltech in many ways is dependent on the success of Linux. We think Linux is a Good Thing. We support Linux in many ways. On the other hand everybody has the right to bring his case to court. In this case it is very strange that they have not pinpointed exactly where in the code there is a problem and we feel that if they really had a problem with this, they could have acted very differently in presenting this to the community. So again we do not support these actions.
------------------
Seems to be a quite complicated way to say 'no comment'.
People on the OS X side rave about the smooth opaque window moves and exposes under Aqua and try to portray it as if it were some advanced technology in OS X. But you can get the same behavior under X11--turn on "backing store", it's a server option. Lots of other systems had the same functionality, including AmigaOS (notable because it came out around the same time as the original MacOS).
The reason it isn't turned on by default is that that kind of buffering consumes a lot of memory. Furthermore, once you turn it on by default, software authors will not pay attention to redraw logic anymore and applications will become unusable without backing store.
X11 made the decision to leave it off by default, OS X made the decision to turn it on.
For fuck's sake get your fucking pyramid scheme spam out of your fucking post. That belongs in your sig, so those of us who are not interested in your spam can turn it off and not have to read your spam.
I looked at Cairo because it purported to be fixed point, which would have made it ideal for many embedded consumer products (which rarely have FPUs), and enabled them to have pretty OS X style graphics.
I was most disappointed when I found out it was only the API that was fixed point, and most of the internals used floating point.
FLTK 2.0 http://fltk.org/ is able to draw using Cairo too, by defining "USE_CAIRO" variable (--enable-cairo).
Opening GNOME Terminal these days takes 10 seconds
4 seconds here. Using the X-one-thousand counting method, where X is an integer greater than 0. Perhaps it's time for you to (a) upgrade or (b) use xterm? I mean...open source is about choice, right? Choose to use a less resource-intensive terminal for your out of date hardware. HELL, i'm using FreeBSD and it's fucking DEAD man!
True. but you could still do something fucking lame like attaching a ata66 drive as a slave to an ata100 drive, in which case you would be running the ata100 drive EXTREMELY SLOW. Just becuase it's activated by default doens't mean you're not so dense as to have your hardware set up incorrectly. Of course, you're probably a troll. In which case I am one as well. In which case, We Have Both Been Trolled. We Should Have A Nice Day.
well I didn't measure it but it's -well- under 1s here so I don't know what's the trouble about...and while I'm at it, cairo does -not- slow down your system, if you would have read the article you would know that it does exactly the opposite (given you have an opengl-graphics card which works) gee, why do I do this anyways?..
Mesa-standalone is a GL layer that doesn't run through X.
XGL is an X server where everything displayed on screen is accelerated.
Cairo makes toolkit graphics vector.
Then it's all done, we'll party with hookers and coke while some guy from Sun complains loadly about daniels removing xeyes from the so called 'modular' tree...
Isn't 4 seconds a bit ridiculous, too?
Both GNOME and KDE tick me off in this regard.
Cairo or Longhorn, same thing. (I wish people would (a) stop overloading "code names", (b) telling everyone what their new thingy is called now until they figure out the real name.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I think he measured 4 seconds for the first terminal to be started during a session (when it still needs to load a bunch of stuff from disk).
When I start a new terminal instance on a 1.1Ghz Centrino machine, it pops up in less than half a second. And if I force a new terminal application to start (which you would normally never have a reason to do), it is still less than two seconds.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Off to work on my Disciple Cheese project...
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
The mechanical engineers in the audience collectively ask, "How many horsepower?"
The idea of GTK+, KDE, and Windows all supporting the same API is enough to make a cross-platform developer giddy.
Go Cairo!
Oh, yeah, and Avalon will be available on XP and 2k3, not just Longhorn.
So will Cairo. Remember that GTK+ is cross-platform. =D
The apparent intellectual conundrum of the halting problem has absolutely nothing to do with the application of pdf and postscript to the domains you describe. Hey, maybe they should try a reduction algorithm to reduce the image sizes???
Now assuming you like graphics and different size fonts, fvwm, twm, or fluxbox etc are debugged, stable and widely available. Install one of them and go about your business.
This has to be one of the funniest parodies I've read in a very long time, and I say that as an avid fan of Gentoo who uses it at work and at home.
... oh damn ... addfjjjjj
Absolutely hilarious!
PS - Gentoo is recompiling my genome as I
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
So, is this or is this not what I've always been seeking in a GUI: total resolution independance? E.g. right now I can have my monitor at 800x600 and everything is *huge*, and I can have it at 1600x1200 and everything is *tiny*. Sure I can have Gnome/Gtk+ use larger icons and fonts. But not larger everything. Currently in Gtk+, one specifies the spacing between widgets in pixels. Will this change to vector units and allow the ability to smoothy scale everything up so I can use the full 1600x1200 but still have things readable? (And no, using a resolution in between those two extremes is not a solution. They are too few; none is quite right. Or it's an LCD where all but one is garbage.) And what will these vector units be?
Actually, I'm usually running at 1024x768. There's always those few programs that just don't fit on the screen... The ability to scale them down would be fantastic. Ideally I'd have an enormous monitor, but I don't.
If this is the direction this small step is headed in, then I applaud the Gtk+ team and look forward to the future with excitement.
Nowadays Xterm can use anti-aliased fonts (see the -fa option) so using it instead of gnome-terminal is a much nicer option than it was a little while ago.
I switched to Xterm for this reason, it starts instantaneously, and terminal I/O is way faster than gnome-terminal (and uses much less CPU).
Actually Cairo was back then vaporware, Bill Gates constantly under the impression of NeXTStep which back then was just released for x86 was talking about an OO based Windows which never saw the light of day. Typical Bill Gates, hold on dont buy that stuff we are working on something similar talk. That is one of the constant tactics Billy boy uses, to keep a competition away from the Windows territory.
Seems to be a quite complicated way to say 'no comment'.
More like a complicated way of saying "we have no idea whether there's any merit to it or not, but even if it were, we think they took the wrong approach" He says we do not support these actions from SCO twice. How much clearer could he be considering it's an ongoing case?
Now, if a certain Darl had been the speaker here, 100 negations would have been worthless. But unless there's evidence to the contrary, I would consider this to be in good faith. He did say their business relies on Linux being successful, btw.
The bloat is not worse than xlib .... since you can bypass with Cairo xlib and go the OpenGL route optionally and get a huge speed increase.
Cairo will also be in the long term one of the X11 core libs, so the bloat is just in your mind not in Cairo...
A lot of people complain about GTK+ being slow ass system
GTK+ using it's native themes is very slow on my system. But using the GTK+ Qt theme (renders GTK+ apps using Qt themes) I see a significant speed increase. So there is definitely a bottleneck in there somewhere, but it's not necessarily the GTK+ library.
What would be nice is a Gnome, HIG-compliant wrapper around xterm.
Slashdot: Where people pretend to be twice as smart as they really are by behaving like children.
I say this weekly on Slashdot, but there ARE open-source 3D drivers in xorg. I've got a RADEON 7500 and a 9200 which are both fully-accelerated for 3D in xorg and xfree.
If you're gonna use Linux, PLEASE buy hardware that works with it from the start. I wouldn't go out and buy a video card that I can't get accelerated 3D on out-of-the-box. Every time you buy a piece of hardware without open specs and interfaces you support the closed philosophy.
It's always been the case that the open-source drivers for 3D cards come out a while (sometimes a LONG while) after the cards are out, it takes a while for the developers to figure out the interfaces and get things working.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Yes, I completely agree. In case it wasn't clear, I was just refering to the poster before me, who claimed:"Do a little research and you'll find that Trolltech is going to answer any questions you may have regarding their connection to the Canopy Group, their board of directors, and the connections between same with a bland 'no comment.'", which is complete BS as can be seen by this interview.
There is nothing they can do about this investment, and with ~5% it's also nothing to worry about. Apart from that, they don't agree with Canopy/SCO. That's all I need to know.
This isn't meant to be a troll or to point the blame on any one entity.
I think the current state of opengl on linux desktops in general can be a pain in the ass. Have an NVIDIA chip in my laptop so I'm pretty much forced to use NVIDIA's drivers if I want 3d acceleration. Now xorg has opengl drivers, but I must use the ones nvidia provides. Sometimes this means switching between interfaces just to get software to compile. To get kde's screen savers, I had to switch to xorg and then back to nvidia' opengl interface. Just to get matlab running, I had to switch to xorg opengl and keep it that way. Now I can't use nvidia's opengl drivers so I can't run any opengl screen savers as long as I plan on using matlab. X crashes if I even try to run glxgears.
So I don't know if it is because of xorg, nvidia, or mathworks, but opengl on my system is becoming a source of lots of problems. That said, will more opengl usage make things better because it will force others to fix the problems, or will I just end up with a system that requires different drivers for different apps and things won't run properly?
The API is floating point. One implementation of Cairo uses XRender as the backend, and that is fixed-point (8 bits after the decimal point).
Some internals of Cairo is in this same fixed-point format due to the expectation when it was being written that XRender would be the main back-end, however I think this is being rewritten to float due to Glitz becoming much more popular and requiring float as well.
Cairo makes it trivial to scale all the drawing done by an application. The big step is that a toolkit such as GTK has to draw *everything* with Cairo. Then only a few small fixes to set the initial size of the windows and to back-transform the location of mouse clicks, you will be able to scale applications.
Yes it is quite possible that the resulting graphics will not be perfect. However at least it will be possible and easy to get to that point. This makes the hurdle of adjusting the graphics to look great much easier.
So the answer is that Cairo is a huge step in the direction you are talking about.
I tried compiling myself a 10-inch vibrating penis, and it didn't work. Maybe I was misusing portage.
Anyway, I switched to Arch. A wide variety of pre-compiled penises are available. I highly recommend it.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
xxx_self_intersect
That sounds sort of, you know, obscene.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
Yeah.. Puppy Helmet! Popcorn Eyeglasses! Peanut-Butter Monkey!!
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
You're assuming that there are only 100 developer through the live of all projects that are interested enough to work on it, and no new developers will join the separate projects as time goes on...and that none of the projects will share code. Those are pretty loose assumptions.
Of course everything you see on the screen is eventually rasterized before being displayed - but that's a requirement for any display thats out puting to a CRT, LCD, etc.
I guess you were not around when top-of-the-line CG was represented as "display lists", basically list of vectors for DAC to convert to voltages steering CRT e-beam across the screen. THAT was true vector graphics! Of course it was so much better suited for engineering blueprints rather than porn collections, so it was quickly replaced by modern bitmapped displays. I think that bitmapped displays became pupular only in late 70s-early 80s, while "vector" dispplays have been around since 60s...
Paul B.
Cool, I'm just working on directx under wine now, It would be nice to get Avalon working on Linux.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Pango is what causes all of the problems with GTK apps being slow. It renders text very nicely - rich text support is all there, i18n support is right in, it can render antialiased bold multibyte kanji as easily as anything else. But the price of that is that it's very slow. I think Qt does some ascii optimisation so you only have the i18n stuff slowing you down if you need it.
I am trolling
What, you mean other than a vectorised rendering backend which is exactly the topic of discussion?
Get rid of X,Qt,GTK, and the silly ass bloatware DEs that sit on top of that and start again with a proper GUI for Linux and I reckon it will vastly increase it's market share.
You could try, but you would probably end up with exactly what you had before.
At the very least, users would want a windowed system that could support multiply displays across networks. They would also want multiple font styles and the ability to read the mouse, keyboard and other input devices. This of course, would have to support accelerated 2D graphics (X-windows) GUI, along with support for accelerated 3D graphics to run games (GLX)
Application developers would want an easy way to develop applications using design tools (Qt), and users would want to have their preferred desktop environment (bloatware DEs) to run their web applications.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads