Cairo 1.18 was released today as the first major stable release to this 2D graphics library in five years. This vector-based graphics library is widely-used for a variety of purposes from GNOME's GTK toolkit to other apps making use of Cairo for targeting different back-ends from PDFs to OpenGL contexts. Mozilla Firefox, WebKit, Mono, and many other open-source projects are notable users of Cairo.

Cairo 1.18 stabilizes all of the API additions made during the Cairo 1.17.x test releases. Cairo 1.18 also drops its cairo-sphinx tool, adds support for Type-3 color fonts for PDFs, documentation improvements, and a wide variety of bug fixes.

Cairo 1.18 does see the removal of a number of older back-ends including Qt4, BeOS, OS/2, DirectFB, DRM, Cogl, and OpenVG. A new back-end is the DWrite font rendering back-end for Windows. The macOS Quartz back-end has also been improved among other back-end work .

More details on this long-awaited Cairo 2D graphics library update via the FreeDesktop.org GitLab .