GlossaryΒΆ

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.