On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 08:49:09PM +0400, Vadim Plessky wrote: | On Wednesday 18 September 2002 4:17 am, Allen Akin wrote: | [...] | | | | I'm not saying all this would be easy, or that OpenGL already provides | | everything that Render might need. But integrating 2D, 3D, and imaging | | via the 3D API is the way Microsoft is going and Apple has already gone, | | and was one of the design goals for OpenGL. ... | | You are speaking here about 3D rendering, or about *rendering in general*?
Rendering in general. Microsoft announced (at the last WinHEC, if I remember correctly) that in releases of Windows XP after 2004, 2D rendering services will be provided through Direct3D. Mac OS 10.2 already has integrated 2D, 3D, and imaging (based in part on OpenGL) in Quartz Extreme. There's so much functionality overlap that a number of workstation application vendors have been using the 3D API for GUI, 3D rendering, and image rendering for years. What's new is the increased likelihood that that will become the mainstream approach. | I am, as many other office workers, primary user of different word | processor(s), spearsheet(s), etc., and I am mostly concerned about quality of | rendering for typical text. I'm not an expert in digital typography. I've been running some experiments with OpenGL-based text rendering, but I've got a ways to go before I reach any strongly-defensible conclusions. What I can say today is that using hardware full-scene antialiasing techniques for rendering small text as geometry works surprisingly well on a CRT. (4X supersampling with Gaussian filtering seems best at the moment. I'd like to try the new FSAA techniques available on the Radeon 9700.) I'd like to look into the process of choosing a level-of-detail that's appropriate for a given drawing size. Obviously this touches on hinting issues as well as more straightforward problems of approximating complex geometry. I speculate that using geometry rather than pixmaps of antialiased characters is a better approach in the long run, because with geometry it's easier to apply small transformations, e.g. subpixel positioning or scaling to preserve sharp vertical elements. I also plan to try multipass rendering to implement high-quality antialiasing filters with support greater than one pixel in area. Given current hardware performance levels, it's quite practical to do this, and it has the advantage that it can take into account the spot characteristics of CRTs. Allen _______________________________________________ Render mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/render
