low-level drawing and interaction
Project description
http://github.enthought.com/enable
The Enable project provides two related multi-platform packages for drawing GUI objects.
Enable: An object drawing library that supports containment and event notification.
Kiva: A multi-platform DisplayPDF vector drawing engine.
Enable
The Enable package is a multi-platform object drawing library built on top of Kiva. The core of Enable is a container/component model for drawing and event notification. The core concepts of Enable are:
Component
Container
Events (mouse, drag, and key events)
Enable provides a high-level interface for creating GUI objects, while enabling a high level of control over user interaction. Enable is a supporting technology for the Chaco and BlockCanvas projects.
Kiva
Kiva is a multi-platform DisplayPDF vector drawing engine that supports multiple output backends, including Windows, GTK, and Macintosh native windowing systems, a variety of raster image formats, PDF, and Postscript.
DisplayPDF is more of a convention than an actual specification. It is a path-based drawing API based on a subset of the Adobe PDF specification. Besides basic vector drawing concepts such as paths, rects, line sytles, and the graphics state stack, it also supports pattern fills, antialiasing, and transparency. Perhaps the most popular implementation of DisplayPDF is Apple’s Quartz 2-D graphics API in Mac OS X.
Kiva Features
Kiva currently implements the following features:
paths and compiled paths; arcs, bezier curves, rectangles
graphics state stack
clip stack, disjoint rectangular clip regions
raster image blitting
arbitrary affine transforms of the graphics context
bevelled and mitered joins
line width, line dash
Freetype or native fonts
RGB, RGBA, or grayscale color depths
transparency
Prerequisites
You must have the following libraries installed before building or installing the Enable project:
ReportLab Toolkit for PDF backend support in Kiva.
(on Linux) X11-devel (development tools for X11)
