Cairo 1.16 Released With OpenGL ES 3.0 Support, Colored Emojis

It's been four years since the debut of the Cairo 1.14 stable series and today that has been succeeded by Cairo 1.16. Cairo, as a reminder, is the vector graphics library for 2D drawing and supports back-ends ranging from OpenGL to PDF, PostScript, DirectFB, and SVG outputs. Cairo is used by the likes of the GTK+ tool-kit, Mozilla's Gecko engine, Gnuplot, Poppler, and many other open-source projects.

Given the significant time since the introduction of the Cairo 1.14 stable series, Cairo 1.16 is packing a lot of new functionality for this release issued today by Samsung open-source developer Bryce Harrington. Cairo 1.16 adds OpenGL ES 3.0 support to its OpenGL back-end, there are many improvements to its PDF back-end, support for variable fonts, support for colored emoji glyphs, and a variety of other fixes/improvements. The Skia back-end has also been dropped with Cairo 1.16.

Cairo 1.16 was developed over the past four years in a number of Cairo 1.15 development releases. A more extensive list of all the changes including API additions for Cairo 1.16 can be found via the 1.16 release.