The final 1.1 version of DXCanvas is now available directly from here or on Wincustomize. There is now two new functions available from script allowing you to suspend the canvas drawing updates. This allows you to do all the drawing necessary for a frame of animation and refresh the canvas at the end, instead of having it refresh at 30fps while your script is doing all the drawing operations.

With this new API, it was possible to fix all the flickering in the included examples! I’ve also added a few new example scripts. Check out the Polygon example, as well as all the text-related ones.

Changelog

1.1 Build 287:

• Added manual drawing mode with suspendDrawing/resumeDrawing methods
  (this should allow users to work around the flickering)
• Fixed text position being off baseline when drawing on a path
• Fixed a rare crash when drawing text on a path
• Activated Pixman MMX&SSE2 fast paths
• Updated Pango to fix font leak (rev 2746)
• Updated Pixman (0.13.2)

This small update brings a proper shadow implementation with blurring, two new functions (textPath and textAlongPath) and a few bug fixes. textAlongPath is still somewhat buggy with multi-segment paths but otherwise works great (see the TextWave demo). I fixed a few problems with arcTo that wasn’t working as specified and made a few changes here and there. More importantly, I fixed a nasty crash bug that was sometimes happening on exit.

The main thing not fixed in this version is the flickering when drawing, but I think I know what the root of the problem is and I might be able to fix it for the final 1.1 build.

You can find a beta build here.

Changelog

1.1 Build 269:

• Added textPath, textAlongPath (with stroke or fill option)
• Added support for shadows
• arcTo is incorrect when the three points are collinear
• arcTo should draw a straight line from P0 to P1
• restore() with an empty stack has no effect
• Corrected order of data returned by getImageData (BRGA -> RGBA)
• ImageData is now converted to non-premultiplied color
• Preserve the current path when clipping
• rgba colors were not converted to string properly (green had the wrong value)
• Some composite operations are now handled correctly
• Fixed Debug build crashing when expired
• Fixed stack overflow crash on exit
• Added check for font validity on assignment and fallback to default font (will raise an error in debug mode if font is incorrect)
• Moved state management to its own class
• Updated Cairo(1.8.4), Pixman(0.12.0), Pango(1.22.3), Glib(2.18.3) and libpng(1.2.33)

Here I will write about whatever project I may be working on at the moment.