Glossary¶

AGG¶: The Anti-Grain Geometry (Agg) rendering engine, capable of rendering high-quality images
Cairo¶: The Cairo graphics engine
FreeType¶: FreeType is a font rasterization library used by matplotlib which supports TrueType, Type 1, and OpenType fonts.
GTK¶: The GIMP Toolkit (GTK) graphical user interface library
PyGObject¶: PyGObject provides Python wrappers for the GTK widgets library
pyqt¶: pyqt provides python wrappers for the Qt widgets library and is required by the matplotlib Qt5Agg and Qt4Agg backends. Widely used on linux and windows; many linux distributions package this as 'python-qt5' or 'python-qt4'.
Qt¶: Qt is a cross-platform application framework for desktop and embedded development.
Qt4¶: Qt4 is the previous, but most widely used, version of Qt cross-platform application framework for desktop and embedded development.
Qt5¶: Qt5 is the current version of Qt cross-platform application framework for desktop and embedded development.
Tk¶: Tk is a graphical user interface for Tcl and many other dynamic languages. It can produce rich, native applications that run unchanged across Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and more.
wxpython¶: wxpython provides python wrappers for the wxWidgets library for use with the WX and WXAgg backends. Widely used on linux, OS-X and windows, it is often packaged by linux distributions as 'python-wxgtk'
wxWidgets¶: WX is cross-platform GUI and tools library for GTK, MS Windows, and MacOS. It uses native widgets for each operating system, so applications will have the look-and-feel that users on that operating system expect.