Anti-Grain Geometry

Anti-Grain Geometry (AGG) is a high-quality 2D rendering library written in C++. It features anti-aliasing and sub-pixel resolution. It is not a graphics library, per se, but rather a framework to build a graphics library upon.

The library is operating system independent and renders to an abstract memory object. It comes with examples interfaced to the X Window System, Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, AmigaOS, BeOS, SDL. The examples also include an SVG viewer.

The design of AGG uses C++ templates only at a very high level, rather than extensively, to achieve the flexibility to plug custom classes into the rendering pipeline, without requiring a rigid class hierarchy, and allows the compiler to inline many of the method calls for high performance. For a library of its complexity, it is remarkably lightweight: it has no dependencies above the standard C++ libraries and it avoids the C++ STL in the implementation of the basic algorithms. The implicit interfaces are not well documented, however, and this can make the learning process quite cumbersome.

While AGG version 2.5 is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or greater, AGG version 2.4 is still available under the 3-clause BSD license and is virtually the same as version 2.5.

History

Active development of the AGG codebase stalled in 2006, around the time of the v2.5 release, due to shifting priorities of its primary developer Maxim Shemanarev. Shemanarev remained active in the community until his sudden death in November, 2013.^[1] Development has continued on a fork of the more liberally licensed v2.4 on SourceForge.net.^[2]

Usage

• The Haiku operating system uses AGG in its windowing system.
• It is one of the renderers available for use in GNU's Gnash Flash player.
• Graphical version of Rebol language interpreter is using AGG for scalable vector graphics DRAW dialect.
• Hilti uses it in some of their rebar detection tools, like the PS 1000.
• Matplotlib uses AGG as its back-end rendering engine.^[3]
• fpGUI Toolkit has an optional AggPas back-end rendering engine.^[4] Work is being done to make AggPas the default or sole rendering engine for fpGUI.
• Mapnik, the toolkit that renders the maps on the OpenStreetMap website, uses AGG for all its map rendering.
• HTTPhotos uses AGG to scale photos.
• Pdfium, the PDF rendering engine used by Google Chrome makes use of AGG^[5]
• Graphics Mill, the .NET imaging SDK uses AGG as its drawing engine.^[6]

References

External links

• Official website
• AGG at sourceforge a copy of original website (created due to discontinuation of original site)
• Updated fork of v2.4 that maintains the original BSD license.
• agg-sharp Is a c# port of the c++ library.
• AggPas is an Object Pascal port of the c++ library.
• AggPasMod is a modernized Object Pascal port of the c++ library.
• AntiGrainRT is a WinRT wrapper for Windows Store and Windows Phone.