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is it? MacOS has rendered the entire UI via PDF since OSX was first released.

danielvaughn 4y ago
afaik there just hasn’t been a lot of work done towards leveraging the GPU for vector graphics. The one example I can think of is the Slug library.
- djbusby 4y ago
  Like? SVG UIs everywhere? Could you make a UI that's like SVG and onclick handlers do the "magic". We could have a VB6 like SVG UI designer and program "actions" in $LANG?
  - ygra 4y ago
    WPF would probably be that. In any case, modern UI toolkits often are vector-based anyway because of UI scaling. Heck, even ancient ones are, if you look at the Marlett font. That contained scalable UI elements for Windows 95.
- ehvatum 4y ago
  > afaik there just hasn’t been a lot of work done towards leveraging the GPU for vector graphic Sure there has been, in the form of the nvidia path rendering extension. https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering It works great, on nvidia cards. Adobe Illustrator on Windows makes good use of it. Calling the extension from C/C++ and Python is no big deal.
astrange 4y ago
It's not really PDF, it just supports similar operations to PDF. There's more SVG UI elements now.
- naikrovek 4y ago
  but it’s vector graphics, right?
  - astrange 4y ago
    Only very recently. Like, all that old Aqua stuff wasn't vectors, it was done in Photoshop. Bitmaps are much faster to draw and can be made pixel-precise up front. With vectors it's easy to have pixel cracks or blurry lines because it's offset .5px.
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      > Bitmaps are much faster to draw and can be made pixel-precise up front. yes, but that alone doesn't require that bitmap graphics be used. > With vectors it's easy to have pixel cracks or blurry lines because it's offset .5px. only if your renderer or your artwork isn't done correctly; inkscape used to be notorious for floating point rounding errors showing up with very few manipulations of a shape. it's also been very easy to very quickly rasterize vector graphics for some time. maybe not fast enough in the past I guess, but computers are certainly fast enough now. I look forward to a time when UIs are just all vector all the time, and it's the monitor itself which rasterizes, thanks to a program that the attached device uploads as it boots up or as the monitor is connected. it's going to get more and more difficult to continue increasing display resolutions and refresh rates over long inexpensive cables if we continue to rasterize on a computer and push raw pixels to the display device.

afaik there just hasn’t been a lot of work done towards leveraging the GPU for vector graphics. The one example I can think of is the Slug library.

djbusby 4y ago
Like? SVG UIs everywhere? Could you make a UI that's like SVG and onclick handlers do the "magic". We could have a VB6 like SVG UI designer and program "actions" in $LANG?
- ygra 4y ago
  WPF would probably be that. In any case, modern UI toolkits often are vector-based anyway because of UI scaling. Heck, even ancient ones are, if you look at the Marlett font. That contained scalable UI elements for Windows 95.
ehvatum 4y ago
> afaik there just hasn’t been a lot of work done towards leveraging the GPU for vector graphic Sure there has been, in the form of the nvidia path rendering extension. https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering It works great, on nvidia cards. Adobe Illustrator on Windows makes good use of it. Calling the extension from C/C++ and Python is no big deal.

astrange 4y ago

It's not really PDF, it just supports similar operations to PDF. There's more SVG UI elements now.

naikrovek 4y ago
but it’s vector graphics, right?
- astrange 4y ago
  Only very recently. Like, all that old Aqua stuff wasn't vectors, it was done in Photoshop. Bitmaps are much faster to draw and can be made pixel-precise up front. With vectors it's easy to have pixel cracks or blurry lines because it's offset .5px.
  - naikrovek 4y ago
    > Bitmaps are much faster to draw and can be made pixel-precise up front. yes, but that alone doesn't require that bitmap graphics be used. > With vectors it's easy to have pixel cracks or blurry lines because it's offset .5px. only if your renderer or your artwork isn't done correctly; inkscape used to be notorious for floating point rounding errors showing up with very few manipulations of a shape. it's also been very easy to very quickly rasterize vector graphics for some time. maybe not fast enough in the past I guess, but computers are certainly fast enough now. I look forward to a time when UIs are just all vector all the time, and it's the monitor itself which rasterizes, thanks to a program that the attached device uploads as it boots up or as the monitor is connected. it's going to get more and more difficult to continue increasing display resolutions and refresh rates over long inexpensive cables if we continue to rasterize on a computer and push raw pixels to the display device.