White Paper: The GNOME Canvas

Technical Paper

by Federico Mena Quintero
federico@nuclecu.unam.mx

Copyright© 1999 by The Free Software Foundation

Content

1. Introduction
2. The Canvas Architecture
3. The Libart Library

Abstract

The GNOME canvas is an engine for structured graphics that offers a rich imaging model, high performance rendering, and a powerful, high-level API. It offers a choice of two rendering back-ends, one based on Xlib for extremely fast display, and another based on Libart, a sophisticated, antialiased, alpha-compositing engine. Applications have a choice between the Xlib imaging model or a superset of the PostScript imaging model, depending on the level of graphic sophistication required.

This white paper presents the architecture of the GNOME canvas and Libart, and describes the situations in which it is useful to use these technologies.

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