3 ms·

I hope I'm not naively over-generalizing a complex process, but is 80% of what he doing just not anti-aliasing straight lines? If that is most of it, couldn't p

• thristian 14y ago
  It's slightly more complicated than that. For example, in his "Markdown Mark" example, he's careful to make sure that the rectangular border is exactly three pixels wide on every side. Just rounding straight lines to the nearest pixel boundary wouldn't guarantee that (it's pretty easy to wind up with shapes that should look even, but are 2px on one side, and 4px on the other). TrueType fonts face exactly the same challenges as described in the article, and they include bytecode for a specialised VM to describe how to nudge control points to pixel boundaries. The open-source FreeType rasteriser has code that's pretty good at doing this automatically, but it's very domain-specific to font-rendering; it would be no use to a general SVG renderer, for example.