[cairo] Turning off antialiasing

Jon Smirl jonsmirl at gmail.com
Tue Oct 19 10:22:50 PDT 2004


On Tue, 19 Oct 2004 10:04:13 -0700, Bill Spitzak <spitzak at d2.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 19 October 2004 09:38 am, Jon Smirl wrote:
> 
> > I've heard rumors that the next generation of video card (or maybe
> > two) will be able to scale and hint on the graphics card. Load your
> > TrueType glyphs on the card and they will be scaled/hinted on the fly.
> 
> Rendering the glpyhs at 128x128 and storing it 1 bit per pixel on the card,
> and using that to draw all sizes up to perhaps 64x64, and using normal
> path-filling for any larger sizes, would probably use far less memory
> than the current scheme of storing 8 bit versions of the glyphs at many
> different sizes.

That is in the next gen cards for sure. It is part of the DirectX 10
spec and needed by MS Avalon.

> The trick is that the scaling hardware must be fast enough, but I suspect on
> modern cards this is no problem. A screen full of text would contain on the
> order of tens of thousands of characters, and we are talking about graphics
> hardware that can now draw a million texture-mapped triangles in one screen
> retrace.

The other thing I have heard is using the GPU to execute an algorithm
like freetype and generate the bitmaps from the font glyphs. I believe
that is still in the research stage.

-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at gmail.com



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