The cairo driver

The cairo driver uses the Pango/Cairo subset of the GTK+ suite of libraries to implement the xcairo interactive device on platforms with X and the wincairo interactive device on Windows platforms. Text and graphics are antialised, font selection is done automatically for any given unicode glyph requested using the recommended fontconfig approach, and complex text layout is used to render text. As a result these devices are two of our three best (the other one is described in the section called “The qt driver”) interactive devices in terms of graphical and text rendering quality. However, the xcairo and wincairo raw interactive capabilities are still immature compared to those described in the section called “The xwin driver”. For example, the interactive parts of standard example 20 do not yet work correctly with these devices. Furthermore, the GUI capability of these devices needs enhancing, e.g., to reorient or zoom plots or to provide a cmap0 and cmap1 palette editor.