Did you ever wonder if free software such as Inkscape is going to get mesh gradients for impressive photorealistic graphics? We have some good news for you.

A new stable version of Cairo 2D vector graphics library has just been released with support for mesh gradients that allow creating complex color transitions and lighting effects. Here is an example created by Tavmjong Bah with his mesh gradients branch of Inkscape:

For Inkscape this public release of Cairo makes the mesh gradient branch one big step closer to becoming part of v0.49, even though there's no final decision on this yet. It will also make conical gradients possible. In fact, it's already available in the branch:

The SVG W3C working group already agreed to make this feature part of the SVG2 specification. You can read far more technical details about the implementation on Tav's website. Currently there are no builds of the mesh gradient branch that we are aware of.

For Scribus it's also important as it also has a basic support for mesh gradient fills for ca. 2 years — both creating, editing and importing from PDF and AI files. In fact, it was the first application to make use of this new Cairo feature. It's most likely that Scribus 1.5.0 will have this enabled by default.

But the new version of Cairo has even more improvements, especially in terms of performance. Cairo also make it possible to switch between levels of antialiasing (none, fast, good, bad) to finetune performance. The OpenGL backend was ported to GLESv2 and received even more love.

Finally, there are some useful API changes in this release such as being able to address any surface as an image for direct modification of the raster data, as well as foundations of deferred rendering.

For complete release notes please visit this page. Most curious users can download and compile Cairo from source code. Scribus from SVN trunk already ships a local copy of Cairo, albeit it might need an update.