ANNOUNCE: Gtk2Hs special release with cairo support

[Duncan Coutts]

To mark the end of Paolo Martini’s project to add support for the cairo
vector graphics library (cairographics.org) we are pleased to announce a
special “tech preview” release of Gtk2Hs including Paolo’s
contributions. 

Here’s a screenshot from a demo program Paolo and others wrote to show
off the combination of Haskell, cairo and Gtk+.
http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/gallery/Cairo-demo/Cairo_demo_13

You can see more of his latest screenshots in his blog.
http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/archives/category/cairo/

As of version 2.8, Gtk+ now depends on cairo and uses it for much of
it’s drawing. It is a great advance over Gtk’s previous drawing API. The
cairo website describes it thusly:

        Cairo is a 2D graphics library with support for multiple output
        devices. Currently supported output targets include the X Window
        System, win32, and image buffers. Experimental backends include
        OpenGL (through glitz), Quartz, XCB, PostScript and PDF file
        output.
        
        Cairo is designed to produce consistent output on all output
        media while taking advantage of display hardware acceleration
        when available (for example, through the X Render Extension).
        
        The cairo API provides operations similar to the drawing
        operators of PostScript and PDF. Operations in cairo including
        stroking and filling cubic Bézier splines, transforming and
        compositing translucent images, and antialiased text rendering.
        All drawing operations can be transformed by any affine
        transformation (scale, rotation, shear, etc.).

We encourage anyone who has Gtk+ 2.8 installed to give this Gtk2Hs
release a try and to experiment with using the cairo drawing API. Bug
reports and cool screenshots will be gratefully accepted.

Download: http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/gtk2hs-0.9.9.5.tar.gz

The release includes some demos showing how to use cairo in a stand
alone fashion to produce PNG image files and also demos showing how to
use the cairo API for drawing in a Gtk+ GUI (both real-time and
non-real-time). There is also some preliminary reference documentation
available:
http://haskell.org/gtk2hs/docs/gtk2hs-docs-0.9.9.5/

This release is not intended for packaging for distros. The next
ordinary release will of course retain the cairo support. It is intended
that the cairo package will eventually be distributed separately since
it is useful in non-GUI programs too.

This project was undertaken by Paolo as part of Google’s Summer of Code
programme. In our opinion his project has been a success and so we would
like to recommend to Paolo’s official mentor at Google and the judges
that he be counted amongst the successful SoC programme participants and
awarded the full project grant.

Duncan
(on behalf of the Gtk2Hs team)