gtk2/docs/reference/gtk/overview.xml

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<partintro>
<para>
GTK is a library for creating graphical user interfaces. It
works on many UNIX-like platforms, Windows, and OS X.
GTK is released under the GNU Library General Public License
(GNU LGPL), which allows for flexible licensing of client
applications. GTK has a C-based object-oriented architecture that
allows for maximum flexibility.  Bindings for many other languages have
been written, including C++, Objective-C, Guile/Scheme, Perl, Python,
TOM, Ada95, Free Pascal, and Eiffel.  The GTK library itself contains
<firstterm>widgets</firstterm>, that is, GUI components such as GtkButton
or GtkTextView.

</para>
<para>
GTK depends on the following libraries:
<variablelist>

<varlistentry>
<term>GLib</term>
<listitem><para>
A general-purpose utility library, not specific to graphical user interfaces.
GLib provides many useful data types, macros, type conversions,
string utilities, file utilities, a main loop abstraction, and so on.
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
<term>GObject</term>
<listitem><para>A library that provides a type system, a collection of
fundamental types including an object type, a signal system.
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
<term>GIO</term>
<listitem><para>A modern, easy-to-use VFS API including abstractions for
files, drives, volumes, stream IO, as well as network programming and
DBus communication.
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
<term>cairo</term>
<listitem><para>Cairo is a 2D graphics library with support for multiple
output devices.
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
<term>Pango</term>
<listitem><para>
Pango is a library for internationalized text handling. It centers
around the PangoLayout object, representing a paragraph of text.
Pango provides the engine for GtkTextView, GtkLabel, GtkEntry, and
other widgets that display text.
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
<term>ATK</term>
<listitem><para>
ATK is the Accessibility Toolkit. It provides a set of generic
interfaces allowing accessibility technologies to interact with a
graphical user interface. For example, a screen reader uses ATK to
discover the text in an interface and read it to blind users.  GTK
widgets have built-in support for accessibility using the ATK
framework.
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
<term>GdkPixbuf</term>
<listitem><para>
This is a small library which allows you to create GdkPixbuf
("pixel buffer") objects from image data or image files.
Use a GdkPixbuf in combination with GtkImage to display images.
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
<term>graphene</term>
<listitem><para>
This is a small library which provides vector and matrix datatypes
and operations. graphene provides optimized implementations using
various SIMD instruction sets such as SSE.
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
<term>GDK</term>
<listitem><para>
GDK is the abstraction layer that allows GTK to support multiple
windowing systems. GDK provides window system facilities on Wayland,
X11, Windows, and OS X.
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>

<varlistentry>
<term>GSK</term>
<listitem><para>
GSK is a library for creating a scene graph from render nodes,
and rendering it using different rendering APIs. GSK provides renderers
for OpenGL, Vulkan and cairo.
</para></listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</para>
</partintro>