[cairo] Questions about Cairo and Windows

[Zoltán Turányi]

Hi,

I am using cairo on Windows (to create metafiles) and found only one gotcha
so far (that relates to metafiles specifically). A stock DLL should be OK
for most use.

@Maarten: you said you cross-compile cairo for Windows from a Linux machine.
Do you also include windows.h from somewhere? (Right now I can
cross-compile, but not with win32 support.)

Zoltan

2010/10/1 Maarten Bosmans <mkbosmans at gmail.com>

> 2010/10/1 Lucan1d Beetle <lucan1d at hotmail.com>:
> > I am looking for a 2D graphics toolkit for a new large project and Cairo
> is
> > looking promising but one of the requirements I have is that the software
> > runs well on Windows 7 so I would appreciate answers to the following
> > questions:
> >
> >
> > Does Cairo run as well on Windows as it does on other platforms (i.e.
> > Linux)?
>
> Although its primary developers mainly run Cairo on Linux (more
> specifically: on intel graphics) there are enough people interested in
> running it on Windows to keep it in good shape.
> But of course Cairo isn't part of the core infrastructure on Windows,
> so you might run into a bug yourself if you use the latest version.
>
> > Can I build Cairo on Windows or do I have to wait for GTK or someone else
> to
> > build the latest version and release the binaries?
>
> Yes, it can be build on Windows, either using MSVC or through
> GCC+mingw32. Personally I find the easiest option to be
> cross-compiling on Linux using mingw.
>
> I myself have switched to downloading the packages from the OpenSuse
> BuildService. The mingw project over there has a lot of nice packeges
> being automatically build for Windows. See for example:
>
> https://build.opensuse.org/package/show?package=mingw32-cairo&project=windows%3Amingw%3Awin32
> I only compile stuff like Cairo and Gtk myself in order to fix bugs.
> For distribution with my Windows app, I only rely on the binaries from
> the BuildService.
>
> > Can Cairo be built using Visual Studio 2010 or be built in such a way
> that
> > the resulting library works well with code built using Visual Studio
> 2010?
>
> Yep. Although I think there isn't a MSVC project to build it, but you
> have to use a special makefile. But as I have no experience building
> this way, better let some else answer this in more detail.
>
> > In which Windows contexts/containers/frames can Cairo run such as Win32,
> MFC
> > or WPF?
>
> As you can see in the docs:
> http://cairographics.org/manual/cairo-Win32-Surfaces.html
> Cairo needs a HDC in order to be able to draw to a window.
>
> > Are there any known issues, limitations or "gotchas" related to running
> > Cairo on Windows?
>
> The main thing I would say is that there aren't that much developers
> using Cairo on Windows. That said, it works great on Windows and I
> would really recommend you to use Cairo. If you submit patches for any
> problems you might experience, that's even better!
>
> One other thing is the performance of the win32 backend. It is
> certainly sufficient (at least for my app), but I find that using the
> image surface for drawing and then blitting the contents to the win32
> surface is much faster. It's a trivial change code-wise, so you can
> try and profile both to see whether performance is acceptable for you.
>
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > -Lucan1d-
>
> Maarten
> --
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> cairo at cairographics.org
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>
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