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Information about Rendering Engine

A layout engine, or rendering engine, is software that takes web content (such as HTML, XML, image files, etc.) and formatting information (such as CSS, XSL, etc.) and displays the formatted content on the screen. It "paints" on the content area of a window, which is displayed on a monitor or a printer. A layout engine is typically used for web browsers, email clients, or other applications that require the displaying (and editing) of web contents.

The term "layout engine" only reached popular usage when these became easily separable from the browser. For example, Gecko, the Mozilla project's open-source layout engine, is used by a variety of products derived from the Mozilla code base, including the Firefox web browser, the Thunderbird E-mail client, and Seamonkey application suite. Trident, the layout engine from Internet Explorer, is used by many applications on the Microsoft Windows platform to render HTML, as in Outlook Express, some versions of Microsoft Outlook, and the mini-browsers in Winamp and RealPlayer.

Similarly, Opera Software's proprietary Presto engine is licensed to a number of other software vendors, as well as being used in Opera's own Opera web browser, and KDE's open-source KHTML engine is used both in KDE's own Konqueror web browser as well as being used, in an adapted form, as the basis for the rendering engine in Apple's Safari web browser.

The term rendering engine can also refer to text rendering engines like Pango or Uniscribe which make multilingual texts present in proper shape, taking into account bidirectional text, combinations of "basic characters" with accents, and other intricacies of multilingual text.

See also

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Layout engines
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

File extension: .html, .htm
MIME type: text/html
Type code: TEXT
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Extensible Markup Language

File extension: .xml
MIME type: application/xml, text/xml (deprecated)
Uniform Type Identifier: public.xml
Developed by: World Wide Web Consortium
Type of format: Markup language
Extended from: SGML
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A digital image is a representation of a two-dimensional image as a finite set of digital values, called picture elements or pixels. The digital image contains a fixed number of rows and columns of pixels.
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Cascading Style Sheets

File extension: .css
MIME type: text/css
Developed by: World Wide Web Consortium
Type of format: Stylesheet language
Standard(s): Level 1 (Recommendation)
Level 2 (Recommendation)
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The eXtensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) is a family of transformation languages which allows one to describe how files encoded in the XML standard are to be formatted or transformed.
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A computer display monitor, usually called simply a monitor, is a piece of electrical equipment which displays viewable images generated by a computer without producing a permanent record.
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A computer printer, or more commonly a printer, produces a hard copy (permanent human-readable text and/or graphics) of documents stored in electronic form, usually on physical print media such as paper transparencies.
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A web browser is a software application that enables a user to display and interact with text, images, videos, music and other information typically located on a Web page at a website on the World Wide Web or a local area network.
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An e-mail client is a frontend computer program used to manage e-mail. Large all-in-one e-mail clients such as the open source Mozilla Thunderbird and Microsoft Outlook today combine the operations of an MSA, MDA, MRA and MUA in one application.
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Gecko is the open source, free software web browser layout engine used in all Mozilla-branded software and its derivatives, including later Netscape releases. Written in C++ and licensed under MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license, Gecko is designed to support open Internet standards.
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Mozilla was the official, public, original name of Mozilla Application Suite by the Mozilla Foundation, currently known as SeaMonkey suite.

In informal use it has been used in a number of ways and in combination with other phrases, though all of them have been
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Maintainer: Mozilla Corporation / Mozilla Foundation

OS: Cross-platform
Available language(s): Multilingual,[1] EULA in English only[2]
Use: Web browser
License: Mozilla EULA for binary redistribution

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Maintainer: Mozilla Corporation

OS: Cross-platform
Available language(s): Multilingual
Use: E-mail client and news client
License: MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license
Website: www.mozilla.
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Mozilla SeaMonkey may refer to:
  • the Mozilla Application Suite, an Internet suite from The Mozilla Foundation codenamed "Seamonkey" and often referred to simply as "Mozilla"
  • SeaMonkey, the community-driven continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite

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Trident (also known as MSHTML) is the name of the layout engine for the Microsoft Windows version of Internet Explorer. It was first introduced with the release of Internet Explorer version 4 in October 1997, has been steadily upgraded and remains in use today.
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Windows Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer abbreviated MSIE), commonly abbreviated to IE, is a series of proprietary graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems
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Microsoft Windows

Screenshot of Windows Vista Ultimate, the latest version of Microsoft Windows.
Company/developer: Microsoft Corporation
OS family: MS-DOS/9x-based, Windows CE, Windows NT
Source model: Closed source

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Outlook Express is an e-mail/news client that was included with several versions of Microsoft Windows, starting with Windows 98 through the release of Windows XP. Outlook Express was also bundled with Internet Explorer 4.0, and available for Windows 95 and the classic Mac OS 9.
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Microsoft Outlook or Outlook (full name Microsoft Office Outlook since Outlook 2003) is a personal information manager from Microsoft, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite.
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Maintainer: Nullsoft

OS: Microsoft Windows
Linux (3.0 alpha 1 only)[1]

Use: Media player
License: Proprietary freeware, shareware
Website: [1]

Winamp
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Maintainer: RealNetworks

OS: Cross-platform

Use: Media player
License: Proprietary
Website: www.real.com

RealPlayer, briefly known also as RealOne Player
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Presto is the name of a layout engine for the Opera web browser developed by Opera Software. It was first released (following several public betas and technical previews) on January 28, 2003 in Opera 7.0 for Windows; it is the current layout engine being used by the browser.
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Maintainer: Opera Software ASA

OS: Cross-platform

Use: Internet suite
License: Proprietary
Website: [1] Opera is a cross-platform web browser and Internet suite developed by the Opera Software corporation.
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KHTML is the HTML layout engine developed by the KDE project. It is the engine used by the Konqueror web browser, and a forked version (WebKit) is used by Apple's Safari web browser. Distributed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, KHTML is free software.
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Maintainer: The KDE Team

OS: Linux, Mac OS X, Unix-like and embedded systems

Use: Web browser, File browser
License: GNU GPL
Website: Konqueror Konqueror
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Maintainer: Apple Inc.

OS: Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows

Use: Web browser
License: Proprietary EULA, LGPL
Website: Apple: Safari

Safari is a web browser developed by Apple Inc. and included in Mac OS X.
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Pango (Παν語) is a free and open source computing library for rendering internationalized texts in high quality. Different font backends can be used, allowing cross-platform support.
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Uniscribe is the Microsoft Windows set of services for rendering Unicode-encoded text. They are implemented in the DLL USP10.DLL. USP10.dll became available to the public with Windows 2000 and Internet Explorer 5.0.
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List of layout engines
Trident Presto Gecko Tasman WebCore KHTML iCab Prince Gzilla Boxely Tkhtml Robin
Comparison of layout engines
HTML XML XHTML Graphics CSS DOM HTML5 ECMAScript SVG

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Layout managers, used in Widget toolkits, are software components which have the ability to lay out widgets by their relative positions without using distance units.
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This article is copied from an article on Wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia created and edited by online user community. The text was not checked or edited by anyone on our staff. Although the vast majority of the wikipedia encyclopedia articles provide accurate and timely information please do not assume the accuracy of any particular article. This article is distributed under the terms of GNU Free Documentation License.
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