Live data from Hacker News

An interactive guide to SVG paths

joshwcomeau.com

11–20 of 49 posts

Re: An interactive guide to SVG paths

#15
post #14

Would the same bezier curves be used in font rendering? And do we have GPU bezier drawing functions or shader kernels available?

Yes, TrueType fonts use quadratic beziers while PostScript/OpenType use cubic beziers, and modern GPUs offer acceleration through tessellation shaders and compute pipelines like NV_path_rendering extension.

Re: An interactive guide to SVG paths

#16
I always took for granted that devs knew about SVG, but I had come into the industry by way of design, so I had already been toying with vectors for years with Adobe Illustrator and Sketch.

SVG is awesome. Heavily underinvested in the web spec, would love to see SVG2 get some attention.

Re: An interactive guide to SVG paths

#17
Worth noting that SVG manipulation via JSX support (such as in React) can be incredibly useful in practice. I used this to add markers and highlights over scanned documents in the past, as well as bar charts, line graphs etc... all without having to add in massive module libraries. Most charting libraries are excessively large when you just want to show/chart a little data.

Re: An interactive guide to SVG paths

#18

I wonder if Seymour Papert's Logo programming language influenced the SVG path syntax. M and L correspond directly to "pen up/pen down" and move.

M and L and C are abbreviations for "moveto" and "lineto" and "curveto" from Postscript (which SVG was based on). I thought pen up and pen down in logo were "PENUP" and "PENDOWN."
Post reply on HN