Re: xfree will be the best....

Allen Akin wrote:

>On Sun, Apr 06, 2003 at 09:26:43AM -0700, Keith Packard wrote:
>| However, there are a few operations which OpenGL doesn't efficiently 
>| accelerate in some implementations, most notably the text operations ...
>
>I think there's experimentation to be done there.  Straightforward
>rendering of the glyph geometry works, integrates nicely with other
>primitives, and is plenty fast on the three most recent generations of
>hardware.  The open question is whether (or how much) multipass is
>required to get acceptable antialiasing quality.
>

>Other very interesting questions include whether hinting can be
>implemented by vertex programs, and whether performance/quality can be
>enhanced by breaking glyphs into curve-bounded "trapezoids" that can be
>processed by vertex programs or evaluators without triangulation by the
>host CPU.
>  
>
There are AFAIK not very much GPU's(Geforce 3/4) outwhere which are 
doing elevators in hardware.  And you can't use vertex array for elevators.

>Then there's the possibility of storing glyphs as textures, which could
>be a pretty straightforward match for Render semantics.
>  
>
This is IMHO the best path for small glyths.

>|                        ... The compositing modes should be largely
>| compatible with OpenGL, but the component-level compositing has no 
>| equivalent in the OpenGL world that I'm aware of. ...
>
>It can be handled by a fragment program.  The multiple alphas reside in
>a texture that the program accesses.
>  
>
Interesting idea. You could maybe also use multipasses on old hardware 
with locking of the components but that would be ugly and slow.

Marco