[pcwalton]

Main author of Pathfinder here--feel free to ask any questions. :)

Thanks to Nical for the excellent writeup!

[OskarS]

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)?

[pcwalton]

Hopefully, yes!

[jacobolus]

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?

[pcwalton]

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.

[iTokio]

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

[nical]

If you know that the result will not change over frames, blitting a cached image will always be faster than re-rendering. It's not necessarily a need, just an improvement. That said pathfinder is fast enough already that it can deal with rendering interesting workloads every frames at 60fps, and will keep getting better at it, I think that there is room for improvement in the tiling phase.

[pcwalton]

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.