We are just starting to see people playing with cairo. The following list shows some of the libraries and programs that are already available. Additions to this list are quite welcome.
Snippets with screenshots
Øyvind Kolås has put together a great little page of samples showing how to draw useful things with small snippets of code.
Small demos
There are a few small programs that may be useful for learning how to use cairo. We are collecting these in the cairo-demo module in CVS:
cvs -d :pserver:anoncvs@cvs.cairographics.org:/cvs/cairo co cairo-demo
A simple pygtk clock and a pygtk shogiban using svg to pixbuf rendering providing a GUI for gnushogi. Xiangqiboard uses cairo via the Gtk2Hs Library for the Haskell programming language.
Mirco (MacSlow) Müller wrote a Cairo Clock that is a good example of how to use Cairo and librsvg in a real application.
Mike Hearn wrote a very simple demo of how to make partly transparent windows with GTK+ and Cairo, and MacSlow has written a more complete example that uses the new XShape extensions to make the transparent areas click-through.
MacSlow also provided a little demonstration of using cairo-drawn graphics as dynamic textures for OpenGL. You can check out that particular example with:
git clone git://people.freedesktop.org/~macslow/gl-cairo-cube
Further examples regarding cairo, glitz and OpenGL are described on the cairo and OpenGL page.
A multi-threaded animation tutorial with cairo and GTK+: threaded animation with cairo
A pycairo example showing how to use librsvg on windows: cairo rsvg and python in windows
A small physics / blob simulator using Cairo and SDL for rendering: blobsallad
A quick demo showing how to use Cairo and XCB together.
git clone git://git.thisnukes4u.net/cairo-xcb-demo.git
Toolkits based on cairo
Cairo support is integrated into the GTK+ widget toolkit as of version 2.8.
Cairo is one among many GNUstep display backends.
Cairo has been used as the basis for the System.Drawing and System.Windows.Forms (a.k.a. Managed.Windows.Forms) namespaces in Mono's class library since the early creation of Cairo.
The SWT widget toolkit wraps cairo for its advanced graphics API on Linux as of version 3.1.
Julien Boulnois has developed cairo-gtk-engine, a flexible cairo-based theme engine for rendering GTK+ widgets.
Papyrus is a 2D canvas (scenegraph) library which renders using cairomm (and thus cairo). A companion library, papyrusgtk, provides a set of gtkmm widgets that use a papyrus/cairomm/cairo stack for drawing.
uxPython is a Python GUI toolkit that uses cairo for all its rendering.
Charting
Matplotlib is a 2D graph plotting library for Python. It supports a cairo backend.
pyCairoChart is a 2D chart module for python which provides several options to create charts in an easy way, author is bettercom aka Martin Lesser.
Goffice is a library including a 2D graph component with a cairo based backend. This library is used by Gnumeric and Gnucash.
gnuplot is a 2D and 3D graph plotting utility. Since gnuplot 4.2, it has had an interactive terminal written with the wxWidgets library, and this terminal renders the plot with cairo. Mainstream CVS of gnuplot also outputs to pdf with cairo.
PLplot is a 2D and 3D plotting library with several cairo device drivers. Currently these include xwindows, ps, pdf and png.
SVG
librsvg is a SVG rendering library supporting a large subset of SVG 1.1.
Mozilla is using cairo to render SVG content as of Firefox 1.5 and 2.0. Future versions of Firefox, (such as 3.0), are expected to use cairo for rendering all content and UI.
Network Improv wrote an SVG Scene/Canvas Library which renders using cairo.
Other projects and programs
Michael Meeks has done some experiments with making OpenOffice.org render using cairo. Here is his original announcement including screenshots.
There's now a Cairo-based backend for the OpenOffice.org slideshow component (and a prototype for Windows).
Longer-term, the whole OOo stack will be ported to a UNO-based rendering engine (that will transparently support Cairo - screenshots here).
Roadster, cairo-based mapping program
GTK Cairo canvas: plans, experiments, interest
Damon Chaplin has created goocanvas
geocanvas and the related crcanvas (experimental GTK 2.8 canvas)
Sven Herzberg has written a GTK+ Cairo canvas for Criawips (see also: http://www.blaubeermuffin.de/svn/libccc/trunk/ChangeLog)
Alex Larsson (Redhat) has done some preparatory work (no further plans for the moment)
Manuel Cerón is working on UMLCanvas# 2.0
Rick Vinyard has created Papyrus, a C++ canvas (scenegraph) library. The papyrusgtk library provides gtkmm widgets that use a papyrus/cairomm/cairo stack for drawing.
GRAMPS now has a Cairo based family tree in CVS
Beast is working on a cairo canvas.
Jean Bréfort is interested in a gtk cairo canvas for GChempaint
Samuel Abels' ccanvasmm
Bruno Coudoin is interested in a gtk cairo canvas for Gcompris
Tom Cato Amundsen is interested in a gtk cairo canvas for GNU Solfege
Mark Van den Borre is interested in a gtk cairo canvas for a visual MusicXML player.
Dave Robillard is interested in a gtk cairo canvas for Om
Gustavo Carneiro is interested in a gtk cairo canvas for gNumExp
Chris Spencer is interested in a gtk cairo canvas
Nicola Fontana is working on ADG, a non-interactive cairo canvas