_       _       _     ___  
  / _ \   / _ \   / _ \  |  _ \ 
 | |_| | | (_| | | |_| | | |_) |
 |_| |_|  \__, | |_| |_| |_| |_|
          |___/                 

What is it?
-----------
Agar is a type of sugar polymer obtained from seaweed and red algae. Agar
becomes gelatinous in water and is primarly used as a culture medium for
microbiological work. Agar is also the name of an open source GUI toolkit.

Agar is designed to work under any graphics system, on any platform. Some
graphics drivers are single-display (e.g., sdlfb, sdlgl), and other drivers
can provide multiple "native" windows (e.g., glx). Multiple Agar windows are
supported regardless of the underlying graphics driver. Under single-display
drivers, Agar emulates a window manager internally. The Agar application need
not to be aware of the underlying graphics system.

The OpenGL graphics drivers are preferred where hardware acceleration is
available. Drivers for direct rendering to framebuffers are also provided.
As far as the default "theme" is concerned, the appearance of GUI elements
is unchanged across graphics drivers.

A set of standard, common widgets are included in the Agar-GUI library.
Agar is designed such that new widgets can be easily implemented as part
of a separate third-party library or application.

The Agar-Core library provides various utility and portability interfaces,
as well as the "object system" used by Agar and several other libraries.
The object system implements inheritance, serialization, virtual functions,
timers, threads and variable bindings.

Agar is entirely thread-safe when built with thread support. Thread-safety
considerations are documented in the API reference; see AG_Threads(3) for
details.

Documentation
-------------
- The online API Reference. This is a detailed description of all
  public Agar structures, objects and functions, at:
  http://libagar.org/man3
- On Unix-like platforms, the API reference is also available in
  traditional manual page format; see AG_Intro(3).
- The Agar Wiki (user-contributed tutorials, code snippets), at:
  http://wiki.libagar.org/
- The Agar Manual (work in progress), at:
  http://libagar.org/man/.

Availability
------------
Download the most recent Agar version from the Agar home page at:
http://libagar.org/download.html.

Portability
-----------
Agar is portable to many different platforms, including FreeBSD, IRIX,
Linux, MacOS Classic, MacOS X, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and Windows. Agar
has been used on ARM embedded devices. It has even been ported to game
consoles such as the GP2x, the Nintendo Gamecube/Wii and the Xbox. See:
http://libagar.org/portable.html.

License
-------
Agar is freely distributable under the terms the "new" BSD license:
http://libagar.org/license.html.

How to contribute
-----------------
See: http://libagar.org/contribute.html.

Libraries and toolkits based on Agar
------------------------------------
Here are some useful libraries which implement new Agar widgets and
extend Agar's functionality toward more specific applications:

Agar-MATH	General-purpose math library (bundled, use `agar-math-config`)
Agar-VG		Vector graphics library (bundled, use `agar-vg-config`)
Agar-RG		Raster graphics library (bundled, use `agar-rg-config`)
Agar-DEV	Developer/debugging tools (bundled, use `agar-dev-config`)
FreeSG		2D/3D graphics engine (http://freesg.org/)
Edacious	Electronics design (http://edacious.org/)
CADTools	Computer-aided design (http://cadtools.hypertriton.com/)