A layout engine, or rendering engine, is software that takes marked up A markup language is a modern system for annotating a text in a way that is syntactically distinguishable from that text. The idea and terminology evolved from the "marking up" of manuscripts, i.e. the revision instructions by editors, traditionally written with a blue pencil on authors' manuscripts. Examples are typesetting instructions content (such as HTML HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content, XML Extensible Markup Language is a set of rules for encoding documents in machine-readable form. It is defined in the XML 1.0 Specification produced by the W3C, and several other related specifications, all gratis open standards, image A digital image is a representation of a two-dimensional image using ones and zeros . Depending on whether or not the image resolution is fixed, it may be of vector or raster type. Without qualifications, the term "digital image" usually refers to raster images also called bitmap images files, etc.) and formatting information (such as CSS Cascading Style Sheets is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL, XSL In computing, the term Extensible Stylesheet Language is used to refer to a family of languages used for transforming and rendering XML documents, etc.) and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer In computing, a printer is a peripheral which produces a hard copy of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper or transparencies. Many printers are primarily used as local peripherals, and are attached by a printer cable or, in most newer printers, a USB cable to a computer which serves as a document. A layout engine is typically used for web browsers A web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content. Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to, e-mail clients An email client, email reader, or more formally mail user agent , is a computer program used to manage a user's email, or other applications that require the displaying (and editing) of web contents.
The term "layout engine" reached popular use when these became easily separable from the browser.[citation needed] For example, Gecko Gecko is a layout engine currently developed by Mozilla Corporation, known as the layout engine of the Firefox web browser, Mozilla Application Suite, Nvu, Mozilla Thunderbird and many more. It is designed to support open Internet standards, and is used by applications such as Mozilla Firefox, Camino, Flock, SeaMonkey, K-Meleon, Netscape 9,, the Mozilla Mozilla is a term used in a number of ways in relation to the now-defunct Netscape Communications Corporation and its related application software, including the Mozilla.org group and its successor the Mozilla Foundation project's open-source layout engine, is used by a variety of products derived from the Mozilla code base, including the Firefox Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation. A Net Applications statistic put Firefox at 24.59% of the recorded usage share of web browsers as of April 2010[update], making it the second most popular browser in terms of current use worldwide after Microsoft's web browser, the Thunderbird Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open source, cross-platform e-mail and news client developed by the Mozilla Foundation. The project strategy is modeled after Mozilla Firefox, a project aimed at creating a web browser. On December 7, 2004, version 1.0 was released, and received over 500,000 downloads in its first three days of release, and 1,000,000 e-mail client, and Seamonkey application suite. Trident Trident is the name of the layout engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer. It was first introduced with the release of Internet Explorer version 4.0 in October 1997; it has been steadily upgraded and remains in use today. For versions 7 and 8 of Internet Explorer, Microsoft made significant changes to the Trident layout, the layout engine from Internet Explorer Windows Internet Explorer , is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems starting in 1995. It has been the most widely used web browser since 1999, attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003 with IE5 and IE6, is used by many applications on the Microsoft Windows Microsoft Windows is a series of software operating systems and graphical user interfaces produced by Microsoft. Microsoft first introduced an operating environment named Windows in November 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal platform, such as Outlook Express Outlook Express is an e-mail/news client that is included with Internet Explorer versions 4.0 through 6.0. As such, it is also bundled with several versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 98 to Windows XP, and is available for Windows 95 and Mac OS 9. In Windows Vista, Outlook Express was superseded by Windows Mail, then again by Windows Live, some versions of Microsoft Outlook Microsoft Outlook, formerly Microsoft Office Outlook, is a personal information manager from Microsoft. The 2007 version is available both as a separate application as well as a part of the Microsoft Office suite. The current versions are Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 for Windows and in late 2009, Microsoft released the beta version of Microsoft, and the mini-browsers in Winamp Winamp is a media player for Windows-based PCs, written by Nullsoft, now a subsidiary of AOL. It is proprietary freeware/shareware, multi-format, extensible with plug-ins and skins, and is noted for its graphical sound visualization, playlist, and media library features. Winamp was released by Justin Frankel in 1997, and its popularity grew and RealPlayer RealPlayer is a closed source cross-platform media player by RealNetworks that plays a number of multimedia formats including MP3, MPEG-4, QuickTime, Windows Media, and multiple versions of proprietary RealAudio and RealVideo formats. Opera Software's proprietary Presto Presto is a layout engine for the Opera web browser developed by Opera Software. After several public betas and technical previews, it was released on January 28, 2003 in Opera 7.0 for Windows; it is the browser's current layout engine. Presto is dynamic: the page or parts of it can be re-rendered in response to DOM and script events. Presto is engine is licensed to a number of other software vendors, and is used in Opera's own web browser Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading Web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal computers and mobile. KDE's open-source KHTML KHTML is the HTML layout engine developed by the KDE project. It is the engine used by the Konqueror web browser. A forked version of KHTML called WebKit is used by several web browsers, among them Safari and Google Chrome. Distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, KHTML is free software engine is used in KDE's Konqueror Konqueror is a web browser and file manager that provides file-viewer functionality to a wide variety of things: local files, files on a remote ftp server and files in a disk image. It is designed as a core part of the KDE desktop environment. It is developed by volunteers and can run on most Unix-like operating systems and on Windows systems, too web browser and is adapted for the basis for WebKit WebKit is a layout engine designed to allow web browsers to render web pages. The WebKit engine provides a set of classes to display web content in windows, and implements browser features such as following links when clicked by the user, managing a back-forward list, and managing a history of pages recently visited, the rendering engine in Apple's Safari Safari is a graphical web browser developed by Apple and included as part of the Mac OS X operating system. First released as a public beta on January 7, 2003 on the company's Mac OS X operating system, it became Apple's default browser beginning with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther." Safari is also the native browser for the iPhone OS. A and Google's Chrome Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine and application framework. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on 2 September 2008, and the public stable release was on 11 December 2008. The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web web browsers.
The term rendering engine can also refer to text rendering engines like Pango Pango is an LGPL licensed open source computing library used by software developers for laying out and rendering text in high quality, emphasising support for multilingual text. Different font backends can be used, allowing cross-platform support, so that Pango-rendered text will appear similar under different operating systems, such as Linux,, International Components for Unicode International Components for Unicode is an open source project of mature C/C++ and Java libraries for Unicode support, software internationalization and software globalization. ICU is widely portable to many operating systems and environments. It gives applications the same results on all platforms and between C/C++ and Java software. The ICU (ICU) or Uniscribe Uniscribe is the Microsoft Windows set of services for rendering Unicode-encoded text, especially complex text layout. They are implemented in the DLL USP10.DLL. USP10.dll became available to the public with Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer 5.0. In addition, the Windows CE platform has supported Uniscribe since version 5.0 which make multilingual texts present in proper shape, taking into account bidirectional text, combinations of "basic characters" with accents, and other intricacies of multilingual text.
See also
- Comparison of layout engines The following tables compare general and technical information for a number of layout engines. Please see the individual products' articles for further information. This article is not all-inclusive or necessarily up-to-date. Unless otherwise specified in footnotes, comparisons are based on the stable versions without any add-ons, extensions or
- List of layout engines The following is a list of named layout engines. While all applications which display content based on a markup language use a layout engine, not all layout engines are given code names by their developers. The majority of the engines below are found in web browsers, but some are from email applications or operating systems
- Layout manager Layout managers are software components used in widget toolkits which have the ability to lay out widgets by their relative positions without using distance units. It is often more natural to define component layouts in this manner than to define their position in pixels or common distance units, so a number of popular widget toolkits include this
- Game engine A game engine is a software system designed for the creation and development of video games. There are many game engines that are designed to work on video game consoles and desktop operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. The core functionality typically provided by a game engine includes a rendering engine for 2D or 3D
- Rendering (computer graphics) Rendering is the process of generating an image from a model, by means of computer programs. The model is a description of three-dimensional objects in a strictly defined language or data structure. It would contain geometry, viewpoint, texture, lighting, and shading information. The image is a digital image or raster graphics image. The term may
- Rasterisation Rasterization or Rasterisation is the task of taking an image described in a vector graphics format and converting it into a raster image (pixels or dots) for output on a video display or printer, or for storage in a bitmap file format
- Raster image processor A raster image processor is a component used in a printing system which produces a raster image also known as a bitmap. The bitmap is then sent to a printing device for output. The input may be a page description in a high-level page description language such as PostScript, Portable Document Format, XPS or another bitmap of higher or lower
- Page description language A page description language is a language that describes the appearance of a printed page in a higher level than an actual output bitmap. An overlapping term is printer control language, but it should not be confused as referring solely to Hewlett-Packard's PCL. PostScript, one of the most noted page description languages, is a fully fledged
Categories: Layout engines
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TechTremor.com (blog)
Features include multi-touch pinch-to-zoom, tabbed browsing, and a new text rendering engine that brings supports sub pixel positioning for text. ...
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