composite manager thoughts

[Jon Smirl]

This is why I've been sending some proposals around to people about drawing text
with pixel shaders. The basic idea is to have one shader per glyph. TrueType
glyphs would be preprocessed into curve segments and each pixel would be tested
if it is inside or outside the segments. To use, set the shader and then draw a
rectangle, the shader will turn the rectangle into a glyph.  The really neat
thing about drawing text with shaders is that it automatically scales and
distorts with no loss of resolution.  It is possible to antialias, subpixel
render, hint at small sizes, etc in the shader program.

So far as I know no one has actually tried writing a shader that draws text.


--- Allen Akin <akin@pobox.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 27, 2003 at 08:08:48PM -0800, Keith Packard wrote:
> | 
> |                  ... Perhaps we should sit down and sketch out the whole 
> | system, from toolkit through window and compositing management to see how 
> | this part of the system should work.  ...
> 
> Sounds reasonable.
> 
> I've got abysmal connectivity for the next five days, so I can't participate
> in
> the discussion as much as I'd like.  However, I did want to pose a question.
> 
> Is the intent that the compositing manager never perform geometric
> transformations when displaying the contents of application drawing surfaces?
> 
> If the compositing manager is intended to perform scaling or more complex
> geometric transformations, then you might be forced to to have a fairly wide
> interface between compositing manager and applications.  Furthermore, it might
> become necessary to re-render in a larger number of situations.  For example,
> scaling down a window containing text might make the text unpleasant to read
> unless the app re-renders with appropriate hinting.  If the scale factor is
> nonuniform (e.g. a perspective transformation or an application of a window to
> a curved surface), even the specification of the necessary parameters is
> challenging.  (Though not impossible; it's similar to the geometric
> level-of-detail problem in 3D rendering, and could be attacked at the
> vertex-programming level.)
> 
> Allen
> 
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=====
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl@yahoo.com

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