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adg-1 reference manual |
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Automatic Drawing Generation is GObject-based library that provides a non-interactive cairo canvas specifically designed for generating technical drawings.
If you want to develop an application that needs to show and print drawings where some data change but the overall design is always the same, the ADG library can be quite useful. In manufacturing industries this is often a good choice and could help to greatly improve the productivity of technical offices.
You could reach similar targets using parametric CADs but a custom application provides the following benefits:
For further details, visit the ADG home page.
The project grew up around the GObject library: the ADG canvas is developed in plain C using the object-oriented approach supplied by GObject.
The mathematical and geometrical algorithms, together with some useful function to manipulate cairo paths, are kept in a separated library. Although the CPML library (Cairo Path Manipulation Library) is scattered across the ADG tree, it can be easily splitted on its own in future, if requested.
The rendering is based on the cairo engine, so the ADG project fully shares strong and weak points of the underlying cairo library.
For the optional database connectivity, my suggestion is to take a look to the libgda project, partly because it is a good and actively maintained project and partly because it uses the ADG technologies (object-oriented C code using GObject), so can be easily integrated in a single application.
The ADG library has the following dependencies:
The required packages must be installed prior the ADG building: they should be provided by nearly every decent unix-like system. The ADG is mainly developed on GNU/Linux systems but its dependecies are known to be cross platform so a porting should be quite easy (if not automatic).
The ADG build system is based on GNU autotools, the de-facto standard for managing free software projects.
tar xjvf adg-0.6.0.tar.bz2
./configure --help
to get all the available options.
Furthermore, the INSTALL file gives you a detailed description of
the common options.
cd adg-0.6.0 ./configure
makeOnce the building has finished, you are able to run the demo program without installing anything. Just try it out:
./demo/adg-demo
--prefix
option in configure) that is user-writable.
make installIf you have
sudo
access you can use it by prefixing the installation
command to temporary gain root privileges:
sudo make install
make uninstallfrom inside the ADG build directory (or
sudo make uninstall
). Just
be sure to have the same privileges you had when installing it.