A look at pathfinder • Hacker News Board

Re: A look at pathfinder

#11

Post by pcwalton » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:32 PM UTC

iTokio wrote: post #6

pcwalton wrote: post #2

Main author of Pathfinder here--feel free to ask any questions. :) Thanks to Nical for the excellent writeup!

Is there still a need to cache results in a texture or is it practical to render from scratch each frame?

I would like to eventually add the option to cache masks in a texture. I think this should probably be an option for the user and not something I do behind the user's back unless the user explicitly opts into heuristics, though.

Re: A look at pathfinder

#12

Post by pcwalton » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #10

pcwalton wrote: post #2

Main author of Pathfinder here--feel free to ask any questions. :) Thanks to Nical for the excellent writeup!

Does this do proper linear (rather than gamma-encoded) compositing / anti-aliasing? If so, do people get mad that their fonts look a bit lighter than existing rasterization tools which (incorrectly) work in gammma-encoded color space?

Gamma correct compositing is an option. You can play with it if you load a monochrome SVG in the demo.

For fonts, Pathfinder uses the standard trick of dilating the outlines a bit in order to make fonts look a bit darker at small sizes.

Re: A look at pathfinder

#13

Post by pcwalton » Thu, May 30, 2019, 2:33 PM UTC

OskarS wrote: post #5

pcwalton wrote: post #2

Main author of Pathfinder here--feel free to ask any questions. :) Thanks to Nical for the excellent writeup!

My previous (rather limited) understanding of Pathfinder was that it was just a text renderer, I didn't realize that it was a more general vector graphics package. Is the idea for Pathfinder that it should be integrated into Firefox for all its vector rendering needs (SVG and so forth)?

Hopefully, yes!