Cairo Graphics Sees Major Improvements To Its SVG Backend

The Cairo 2D vector graphics library used by the likes of GTK, Mozilla, WebKit, and many other open-source projects is seeing some big strides made on its SVG back-end.

Merged this morning was a large set of changes to the Cairo graphics library's SVG back-end. The merge fixes various SVG back-end bugs, including incorrect output and other pressing issues as well as bugs that appeared in other Cairo-using software like Poppler. The changes fix a lot of Cairo's existing SVG problems.

Among the code changes were addressing the use of uninitialized memory in the SVG surface, addressing problems outputting to surfaces and patterns, removal of SVG 1.2 support, supporting PDF Type 3 fonts, and more. There were more than two dozen changes

So should you be relying on Cairo's SVG support directly or indirectly via the many software components leveraging this library, this merge request that will be part of Cairo's next feature release is an important step forward.