cairo-lite: 2D graphics library

A trimmed-down fork of cairo targeting Linux only, built with CMake, and some exotic features removed.

Removed from upstream cairo:

• Xlib and XCB surface backends
• Quartz (macOS) backend
• Win32 / DirectWrite backend
• PDF surface backend
• PostScript surface backend
• Script surface backend
• GObject introspection bindings
• All test, perf, and utility infrastructure

Dependencies

Standard system libraries (libm, libdl, pthreads) are also required but present on any Linux system.

Debian / Ubuntu:

apt install libpixman-1-dev libfreetype-dev libfontconfig1-dev libpng-dev

Arch Linux:

pacman -S pixman freetype2 fontconfig libpng

Building

Requires CMake ≥ 3.16 and a C11-capable compiler.

cmake -B build -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
cmake --build build -j$(nproc)

Both a shared library (libcairo.so) and a static archive (libcairo.a) are produced by default. Pass -DBUILD_STATIC=OFF to skip the .a.

# Install to /usr/local (default)
cmake --install build

# Install to a custom prefix
cmake --install build --prefix /usr

Consuming with CMake

After installation, downstream projects can use find_package:

find_package(cairo 1.18 REQUIRED)

# Link against the shared library
target_link_libraries(myapp PRIVATE cairo::cairo)

# Or link against the static archive
target_link_libraries(myapp PRIVATE cairo::cairo_static)

Consuming with pkg-config

pkg-config --cflags --libs cairo          # shared linking
pkg-config --cflags --libs --static cairo # static linking (pulls in all deps)

Licensing

cairo-lite inherits the upstream cairo licence: either the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1 or the Mozilla Public License version 1.1, at your option.

See COPYING, COPYING-LGPL-2.1, and COPYING-MPL-1.1 for the full licence texts.