4 ms·

For most text rendering in the 2D UI use case, I'm not sure there is that much to solve anymore. Aggressive caching of rendered glyphs solves almost all the pro

For most text rendering in the 2D UI use case, I'm not sure there is that much to solve anymore. Aggressive caching of rendered glyphs solves almost all the problems in practice. From what I can tell, Slug is targeted at games and 3D, where there are still interesting problems, but those aren't the 2D UI case.

moonchild 4y ago
Even in 2-d, it is nice to have smooth zoom in/out. The only way to do this that I know of that doesn't compromise on quality is to re-render every frame, and the only way I know to do that fast is to use the gpu. I believe pathfinder can do it (correct me if I'm wrong). I know I'm working on something that can do it too. Moving a bit farther from the strictly 'text' realm there are authoring tools for vector graphics, where you would like to be able to view the changes you make in real time. CPU can do it (since it's probably the only complex thing onscreen, and changes are likely localised anyway if you really need the extra cycles), but GPU can do it better.
- modeless 4y ago
  Yeah, existing techniques work fine if you want to make something similar to existing systems. But it's a shame to write a whole new GUI library and still have the same old limitations. Zooming is underused in existing systems, probably related to the fact that it's hard to make it work well with commonly used techniques.
- pcwalton 4y ago
  Honestly, there are so few different glyphs on a typical page, and CPUs are so fast, that it usually isn't that hard to just rerender every glyph on CPU and aggressively reuse glyph images in order to hit 60 FPS during pinch zoom, at least for Latin text. CJK may be a different story, but I kind of doubt it. In 2022, smooth font rendering during pinch zoom is yet another case in which we in the software field dropped the ball, but it didn't matter because hardware picked up the slack.
  - moonchild 4y ago
    I wouldn't say it 'doesn't matter'. We get by, sure; but that doesn't mean the situation is ideal. On my laptop, if I try pinch-zooming, safari seems to do bilinear scaling, and firefox CPU usage will dramatically spike. The former is noticeably ugly; the latter is bad for battery life, and may stutter if work is being done in the background (laptops and phones don't yet have hundreds of cores).
    - pcwalton 4y ago
      I would bet that if you profile Firefox WebRender there very little of the time is actually spent rasterizing glyphs. It takes like 10 microseconds to rasterize a small glyph, it's really nothing. Source: This is what I spent a ton of time profiling in the past. And Safari should just rerasterize glyphs while zooming. In 2022 there's no technical reason why it can't.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - mwcampbell 4y ago
    > In 2022, smooth font rendering during pinch zoom is yet another case in which we in the software field dropped the ball, but it didn't matter because hardware picked up the slack. But just letting hardware pick up the slack hurts people stuck with older hardware, right?

moonchild 4y ago

Even in 2-d, it is nice to have smooth zoom in/out. The only way to do this that I know of that doesn't compromise on quality is to re-render every frame, and the only way I know to do that fast is to use the gpu. I believe pathfinder can do it (correct me if I'm wrong). I know I'm working on something that can do it too. Moving a bit farther from the strictly 'text' realm there are authoring tools for vector graphics, where you would like to be able to view the changes you make in real time. CPU can do it (since it's probably the only complex thing onscreen, and changes are likely localised anyway if you really need the extra cycles), but GPU can do it better.

modeless 4y ago
Yeah, existing techniques work fine if you want to make something similar to existing systems. But it's a shame to write a whole new GUI library and still have the same old limitations. Zooming is underused in existing systems, probably related to the fact that it's hard to make it work well with commonly used techniques.
pcwalton 4y ago
Honestly, there are so few different glyphs on a typical page, and CPUs are so fast, that it usually isn't that hard to just rerender every glyph on CPU and aggressively reuse glyph images in order to hit 60 FPS during pinch zoom, at least for Latin text. CJK may be a different story, but I kind of doubt it. In 2022, smooth font rendering during pinch zoom is yet another case in which we in the software field dropped the ball, but it didn't matter because hardware picked up the slack.
- moonchild 4y ago
  I wouldn't say it 'doesn't matter'. We get by, sure; but that doesn't mean the situation is ideal. On my laptop, if I try pinch-zooming, safari seems to do bilinear scaling, and firefox CPU usage will dramatically spike. The former is noticeably ugly; the latter is bad for battery life, and may stutter if work is being done in the background (laptops and phones don't yet have hundreds of cores).
  - pcwalton 4y ago
    I would bet that if you profile Firefox WebRender there very little of the time is actually spent rasterizing glyphs. It takes like 10 microseconds to rasterize a small glyph, it's really nothing. Source: This is what I spent a ton of time profiling in the past. And Safari should just rerasterize glyphs while zooming. In 2022 there's no technical reason why it can't.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  > In 2022, smooth font rendering during pinch zoom is yet another case in which we in the software field dropped the ball, but it didn't matter because hardware picked up the slack. But just letting hardware pick up the slack hurts people stuck with older hardware, right?