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z2d is a 2D graphics library whose main purpose is to raster shapes composed of vector primitives: lines and cubic Beziers, e.g., things you would need if you were rendering something like an SVG file, or rendering shapes directly for UI elements. It also provides a (growing) API for image manipulation, which mainly supports our vector rasterization features, but can also be worked with directly at the lower level.

Our drawing model is (loosely) inspired by Cairo: most operations take place through the Context, which connect Patterns (pixel/color sources) and Surfaces (drawing targets/buffers). Paths contain the vector data for filling and stroking operations, and so on.

Every component of z2d can be worked with directly in an unmanaged fashion without the Context as well, if so desired. Surfaces can be interfaced with directly, Surface and Path can be used with static buffers (in addition to their traditional unmanaged variant), and the painter functions for filling and stroking can be called directly with the output of these. For these cases, Context serves as a reference example. Additionally, plumbing further into the painter package can demonstrate how functions in the compositor package can be worked with at the lower level. Additional supporting functionality (e.g., gradient sources, text, etc.) can also be worked with individually to the extent that it makes sense to do so.

Currently:

• Basic rendering of lines and cubic Beziers, with helpers for arcs (circles native, ellipses through transformations).
• Filling and stroking:
  • Miter, bevel, and round join supported for stroking.
  • Butt, square, and round caps supported for stroking.
  • Dashed lines supported along with offsets for tweaking alignment of patterns to shapes, and zero-length dash stops to draw dotted lines.
• Text rendering: Latin left-to-right text rendering, kerning/GPOS support, diacritics and composite glyphs supported. Fonts can be supplied either on the file system or via external buffer.
• Transformations: rotate, scale, translate, and other operations via direct manipulations of the affine matrix.
• Composition:
  • Single pixel sources and linear, radial, and conic gradients supported. Access to lower-level compositor primitives is supplied to allow for manipulation of surfaces outside of higher-level drawing operations.
  • 28 compositor operators supported across the set of Porter-Duff and PDF blend modes.
• Pixel formats:
  • RGBA, RGB, and alpha-only in 8, 4, 2, and 1-bit formats.
• Color spaces:
  • Linear, sRGB, and HSL currently supported for specifying high-level color. Interpolation supported in all color spaces. More color spaces are planed.
• Exporting:
  • Rudimentary PNG export supported; alpha-channel formats export to greyscale.
  • Support for explicitly specifying output RGB profile to assist with proper color management.

The current plan is to work towards writing a reasonably feature-complete SVG renderer, with the ability to utilize the same primitives to perform other vector rasterization, suitable for UI design and other similar tasks.

zig fetch --save git+https://github.com/vancluever/z2d#[tag or commit]

Note that main and release tags are currently being done against the Zig 0.14.x release. For Zig 0.15.x support, please use the zig-0.15.0 branch.

View the documentation for the latest release at: https://z2d.vancluevertech.com/docs

See the spec/ directory for a number of rudimentary usage examples.

z2d itself is licensed MPL 2.0; see the LICENSE file for further details.

Code examples in the spec/ directory are licensed 0BSD, this means you can use them freely to integrate z2d.

The z2d logo is Copyright © 2024-2025 Chris Marchesi and licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0. Portions of the z2d logo are derived from the Zig logo and logomark, which are also licensed CC-BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of the license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/.