I am finally updating my MiKTeX installation, and I noticed that the wizard wants to install something called
miktex-cairo-....
miktex-graphite2-...
What are they?
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Sign up to join this communityI am finally updating my MiKTeX installation, and I noticed that the wizard wants to install something called
miktex-cairo-....
miktex-graphite2-...
What are they?
cairo
is a vector graphics library. For example, if, for some reason you ever take it into your head to compile something like GIMP yourself on OS X, then one of many things you need to obtain and compile first will be cairo
.
<off-topic>
Nowadays, of course, you'd just download GIMP.app
but in the olden days, many hours of fun were to be had failing to compile GIMP for OS X. The first time I finished, I realised it was largely immaterial whether it crashed on launch or not - merely having compiled something was the achievement!</off-topic>
graphite
is a reimplementation of the SIL text processing engine. At least, that's what my package manager says.
I assume these are needed for some GUI included in MiKTeX. It is possible that TeX Live would also install them in the case of Windows, as well. (But I don't use Windows and don't really know.)
On a GNU/Linux system, these are common components of systems with graphical interfaces (as opposed to text-only systems). TeX Live does not install them on these systems, but TeX Live does not provide any GUI stuff on these systems. You'd almost certainly have to install cairo
, at least, if you wanted to view a PDF, for example, because many PDF viewers are poppler
-based and poppler
depends on cairo
.
I don't know the miktex-
versions but in themselves cairo
and graphite
are perfectly standard.
I have graphite
version 1.1.3.3. because LibreOffice requires it. graphite2
appears to be a development version. At least, the stable version for GNU/Linux still seems to be version 1. But it may well be that graphite2
is required by newer Windows systems or that the development version addresses serious bugs which don't affect GNU/Linux builds. Or maybe MikTeX just like to live dangerously ;). But the danger would be in bugginess, if anything - there's nothing sinister about this software.
cairo
is a vector graphics library.graphite2
is a reimplementation of the SIL text processing engine. At least, that's what my package manager says. I assume they are needed for some GUI included in MiKTeX. It is possible that TeX Live would also install them in the case of Windows, as well. (But I don't use Windows and don't really know.) On a GNU/Linux system, they are common components of systems with graphical interfaces (as opposed to text-only systems). I don't know themiktex
versions but in themselvescairo
andgraphite2
are perfectly standard.