chimera
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Simple Image Generation

Chimera is a higher level graphics abstraction than is commonly
available for Python. Taking advantage of the power of the Pango
library (http://www.pango.org/) we are able to render beautiful
subpixel rendered, anti-aliased text in the fonts of your choice.

Chimera doesn't expose all the funtionality of its underlying
systems. In particular its not about drawing, pixel manipulation or
other low level operations on a surface. Chimera attempts to deal with
handling all its operations in a uniform, simple way so that you can
focus on the output you want to generate, now how to generate it.


Chimera makes handling your image manipulation and generation needs
simple.

Formats
-------

Chimera supports composing images from or generated from:
	all common raster formats (PNG, JPEG, GIF)
	using any TrueType/OpenType font 
	using SVG images as source layers

Internationalization
--------------------

All text handling support full Unicode and support internationalized
layout of text elements.


Transparency
------------

Author subpixel rendered antialiased, fully transparent text,
on-the-fly.


Zope
----


To install on zope, first install the Python library. This involves 
making sure you have pango, cairo and PIL installed. Then copy the
Chimera directory to your Zope's Products directoy.



Platform
---------

Chimera uses a number of native software libraries to accomplish its
work. Pango, Cairo, librsvg-2.0 and their dependencies. Happily this
is portable code. Its easy to install the egg or build from source on
modern Linux distributions. I've also seen this built on both PPC and
Intel Macs. All the relevant software is available on Windows as well
though you will have to build it yourself currently.



-copyright ObjectRealms, LLC 2006