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If you allow yourself to do this work offline, that's one thing, but keep in mind that 2D realtime graphics are a requirement. People still need to render SVGs, HTML5 canvas, the CSS drawing model, etc. Grid fitting might eventually go out of favor for fonts, but that's something that means you need different outlines for different sizes of fonts. See Behdad's excellent document on the difficulties of text subpixel rendering and layout [0]. Also, there's things like variable fonts which we might want to support. The work to break a number of region tiles such that each tile has at most one region might be too fine-grained (think about tiger.svg), and probably equivalent in work compared to rasterizing on the CPU, so not much of a gain there. That said, tiled options are very popular, so you're definitely on to something, though tiles often contain multiple elements. Going down this way lies ideas like Pathfinder 3, Massively Parallel Vector Graphics (Gan et Al), and my personal favorite, the work of adamjsimmons. I have to read this comment [1] a bit between the lines, but I think it's basically that a quadtree or other form of BVH is computed on the CPU containing which curves are in which parts of the glyph, and then the pixel shader only evaluates the curves it knows are necessary for that pixel. Similar in a lot of ways to Behdad's GLyphy. I have my own ideas I eventually want to try on top of this as well, but I think using a BVH is my preferred way to solve this problem. [0] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wpzgGMqXgit6FBVaO76epnnF...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18260138 EDIT: You changed this comment between when I was writing and when I posted it, so it's not a reply to the new scheme. The new scheme doesn't seem particularly helpful for me. If you want to talk about this further to learn why, contact information is in my HN profile. |