General Information
===================

This is a development version of Rapicorn.
Rapicorn is targeted at replacing the use of GnomeCanvas in the Beast
project (http://beast.gtk.org/), and to extend beyond that functionality
as deemed reasonable.
Cairo is planned to be used for rendering tasks, and Pango is used for
text rendering.

Rapicorn so far supports an item hierarchy with cross-references,
type safe per object signal emissions, a Gtk+ based blitting backend, a
Pango based text rendering backend, basic Event processing and focus
handling.
It comes with a prototype set of stock items such as buttons, sliders,
scroll area, table like layout containers and items to paint foreground
or background elements.
It also provides an XML markup parser that allows full GUI specifications
to be written in XML, more of which is detailed here:
	http://blogs.gnome.org/view/timj/2005/07/31/0

In order to build release tarballs, you need a recent version of Pango.
The sources for required packages can be found at:

Pango-1.8:
	ftp://ftp.gtk.org/pub/gtk/v2.6/

Rapicorn tends to hit G++ compiler bugs fairly frequently, so if you
have problems compiling the code, or get segfaults in STL source files,
upgrading your compiler may improve the situation. In particular gcc-3.3
and versions <= 3.4.5 are known to miscompile the code.
GCC 3.4.6 (Ubuntu 3.4.6-3ubuntu1) and newer seem to work fine.
Compiling with a different compiler version than the default on your system
and running all checks Rapicorn offers (they should all succeed) can be
done with a command line similar to:
  export CC=gcc-3.4 CXX=g++-3.4 CPP=gcc-3.4\ -E CPPCXX=g++-3.4\ -E
  ./configure
  make all install
  make report # report runs fast tests, slow tests and performance tests

Preliminary web pages of the project can be found at:

	http://rapicorn.org


Installation
============

See the file `INSTALL'.
