Cairo - Graphics device using cairographics library for creating bitmap images or output.
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Cairo

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Cairo is a graphics device for R which uses the cairo graphics library to provide high-quality output in various formats including bitmap (PNG, JPEG, TIFF), vector (PDF, PostScript, SVG) and on-screen (X11, Windows). It supports alpha-blending (semi-transparent painting), anti-aliasing and font embedding. Since the same engine is used for rendering on-screen and off-screen, is possible to create output WYSIWYG-like output.

See the files section for the latest release.

The main purpose of this package is to replace png/jpeg and similar native devices in R which either rely on X11 or use GhostScript are thus are very slow and not suitable in server applications. Cairo also supports advanced rendering such as anti-aliasing of both lines and text. In addition, it can be used to replace interactive devices such as X11 or Windows where native devices don't have alpha blending support.

The Cairo package requires cairo library 1.2.0 (see http://www.cairographics.org/) or higher with PNG support enabled. Preferably cairo should be registered with pkg-config, otherwise you will have to set CAIRO_CFLAGS and CAIRO_LIBS manually. All other back-ends are optional and will be enabled only if the corresponding support was compiled in cairo or the supporting library is present (libjpeg, libtiff).

cairo supports multiple back-ends and as of now most of them are accessible from Cairo.

This package is released unter GPL (see DESCRIPTION file inside the package for details).

Created by Simon Urbanek, 2005