satine.org

For one of my pet projects, I’ve surveyed the landscape of open source vector graphics libraries out on the net today. Here’s what I’ve found so far:

Smoke – The first one I encountered that uses OpenGL for rendering. Doesn’t implement a complete SVG set, but has some interesting concepts.

Cairo and glitz – Mono’s System.Drawing back-end (might be GTK) with glitz as a backend to OpenGL. A slightly different approach to stroking segments.

svgl – Not maintained anymore, but offers up some information on how clipping and gradients might work with a GPU. Does not stroke joins particularly cleverly, uses forward differencing for stroking segments.

Agile2D – Related to svgl, only uses Java2D’s path code and an unofficial OpenGL bridge. Pretty decent, however they were left wanting for features not available in their bridge.

Anti-Grain Geometry – Very accurate, however unclear on the performance / accuracy tradeoffs.

I just downloaded SharpMT, mostly on the recommendations of other bloggers and because it supports entries and extended entries. It works pretty well, except that the text editor feels just a slightly bit sluggish in responsiveness, but that may be due to the WinForms text entry box more than anything. (It’s also spell-checking everything, so that might be taking up some time)

Update: It doesn’t appear that SharpMT supports “Convert line breaks” in MT, perhaps I need to set an option somewhere…