Guide

Welcome to kcanvas guide. This guide contains general information about kcanvas library, how to build it, setup project to use library and overall concepts.

• Build instructions
• Setting up project to use kcanvas
• Concepts and usage of kcanvas

Build instructions

kcanvas library source comes with CMake project included.

Currently only Windows and Linux builds available

General build example

You need CMake installed on your system to be able to generate Visual Studio solution or makefile to build kcanvas library.

Create new directory where you want to download kcanvas library source. For this example let this directory be named example:

mkdir example
cd example

Clone kcanvas repository:

git clone https://github.com/livingcreative/kcanvas.git kcanvas

Clone kcommon repository, by default kcanvas depends on kcommon headers:

git clone https://github.com/livingcreative/kcommon.git kcommon

Now you can create directory for build (it can be located anywhere you like, for current example it'll be inside our example directory) and generate project files for build (for Windows you'll get Visual Studio solution by default, for Linux you'll get makefile):

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../kcanvas/src

Windows specifics

After running cmake you can open kcanvas.sln solution file and build it with Visual Studio or msbuild. Resulting library files (kcanvas.lib) will be put under lib\<Platform>\<Configuration> subdirectory inside kcanvas source directory.

By default kcanvas library builds with static MSVC runtime, to generate solution with dynamic MSVC runtime you can pass following option to cmake: -Dmsvcruntime=dynamic

Linux specifics

Please note, that on Linux kcanvas depends on Cairo graphics library (which is also part of GTK+) so you need some of this to be present in system. After running cmake you can use generated makefile for building library. Resulting library files (libkcanvas.a) will be put under lib subdirectory inside kcanvas source directory.

Setting up project to use kcanvas

In order to use kcanvas library in your project you need to proper configure include and library paths.

Two include paths should be added to project: one for kcanvas API headers (which are located under kcanvas/include directory) and one for kcommon headers (which are located under kcommon/include directory), kcanvas headers use kcommon headers by default.

This assumes that kcommon repository is clonned to kcommon directory and kcanvas repository is clonned to kcanvas directory

One library path should be added to project - path to directory where kcanvas static library binary located. By default this is kcanvas/lib directory.

lib directory also may contain other subdirectories for different platforms and build configurations

And finally, kcanvas library should be added to linker input. On Windows platform it's named kcanvas.lib, on Linux it's named libkcanvas.a (keep in mind that on Linux linker automatically adds lib prefix and .a suffix to given library name).

Having that setup you can include canvas.h header to get all kcanvas stuff in your code. All kcanvas API declarations are wrapped into k_canvas namespace.

#include "kcanvas/canvas.h"

You can avoid typing kcanvas/ for include directive if you add full path (kcanvas/include/kcanvas) to project configuration. However, to avoid possible collisions with other includes this is not recommended

Concepts and usage of kcanvas

General concepts

This section will describe kcanvas API concepts in general.
Content will be added soon

Canvas API concept diagram:

Canvas concept

This section will describe canvas concept.
Content will be added soon

Lines and shapes

This section will describe vector graphics in kcanvas.
Content will be added soon

Bitmaps and masks

This section will describe raster graphics in kcanvas.
Content will be added soon

Fill and brush

This section will describe concepts of filled shapes.
Content will be added soon

Stroke and pen

This section will describe concepts of shapes outlining.
Content will be added soon

Text and fonts

This section will describe concepts of text rendering and measurment.
Content will be added soon