Cross-platform drawing library

Question

I've been looking for a good cross-platform 2D drawing library that can be called from C++ and can be used to draw some fairly simple geometry; lines, rectangles, circles, and text (horizontal and vertical) for some charts, and save the output to PNG.

I think a commercial package would be preferable over open source because we would prefer not to have to worry about licensing issues (unless there's something with a BSD style license with no credit clause). I've looked at Cairo Graphics which seemed promising, but the text rendering looks like crap out of the box, and upgrading the text back-end brings us into murky license land.

I need it for Windows, Mac and Linux. Preferably something fairly lightweight and simple to integrate. I've thought about Qt but that's way too heavy for our application.

Any ideas on this would be awesome.

Answer 1

I use CImg: cross platform (self contained single header file), simple, concise. PNG is not natively supported but can be handled if ImageMagick is installed (see supported formats).

See also this related question.

Answer 2

You might use Allegro 5 (since SDL and SFML are mentioned). This provides all of the platforms you require (and more) and can render shapes and save to PNG. Version 5 has a much improved API and hardware acceleration. With any of these low level cross platform libraries you'd have to find your own charting solution.

I put some notes on my blog about Allegro and using it on the Mac.

Answer 3

OpenGL?

Answer 4

Antigrain does high quality primitive rendering and seems to be able to render true type fonts and has a commercial license available upon request.

http://www.antigrain.com/

Answer 5

Another one: Skia. Used in Android and Chrome, under active development, HW acceleration.

Answer 6

There is also libgd - simple one, but well-written.

Regarding Cairo Graphics, I can't believe it renders text that looks bad. If you are particularly concerned about text rendering, State of the Text Rendering from Jan 2010 gives quite good overview.