[Pixman] [RFC] A spans interface for pixman

[Bill Spitzak]

Soeren Sandmann wrote:

> Yes; to be a bit more precise, with the current code, the alpha channel
> is a sampled version of the polygon and the rgb channels are 0. Ie., the
> pixels are black with varying levels of opacity.
> 
> An interesting alternative possibility would be to consider the RGB
> channels duplicates of the alpha channel, which would make the pixels
> shades of white instead.

This is definitely better and much more useful. I would in fact have ALL 
1-channel images treated this way, removing a lot of need to have 
different operators whose purpose is only to source a 1-channel image 
that defaults to acting like 0,0,0,x. I'm not sure what will break in 
pixman and/or cairo if this is done, however.

> It could be interesting to add support for polygon operators:
> 
>         pixman_image_create_polygon_intersection (polygon1, polygon2)
>         pixman_image_create_polygon_union (polygon1, polygon2);
>         ...
> 
> These would return a new polygon image that would contain pointers to
> the other two.

It may be possible to actually intersect these and make a new polygon 
with full accuracy. Though in some cases such as matching lines it can 
be painful and may produce a much larger number of path components than 
the two originals. But also if users do this enough times you will end 
up with a whole tree of polygons and CSG-like work.

It may help to detect when the result is identical to one of the inputs 
or to the empty polygon. Such a test may be fast and will reduce the 
size of the tree after many polygons.

Questions:

Can the polygon images be scaled or transformed when used as a source? 
(and produce a correct antialiased result, not scaled pixels).

At the cairo level how could a user directly create a polygon surface? 
Could it just detect that you only drew paths filled with white?