April 27, 2005
> Have you thought about using Cairo?

Well, it is matter of personal preferences
I know author of AGG (Max Schemanarev) in person, so he may help in the
case.

Cairo dependends on libpixman but it is in C.
I need to take a closer look again on it to be short.

I don't think that antialiased rendering should be used everywhere.
For cases when you definitely need it AGG works and works well.
Other GUI stuff - rendering of basic widgets does not require AA drawing.
Harmonia already supports alpha channel rendering so complex
widget shapes rendered as a composition of static 32bpp PNGs.
Harmonia relies on OS graphics primitives which are already
hardware accelerated. E.g. on Windows it uses text rendering
with ClearType (if it is enabled).

Andrew.


"Norbert Nemec" <Norbert@Nemec-online.de> wrote in message news:d4nsch$spn$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Andrew Fedoniouk schrieb:
>> There are plans to create GraphicsEx based on http://www.antigrain.com/ but in next version.
>
> Have you thought about using Cairo? (www.cairographics.org) This might give you far more performance, since it allows hardware accellerated backends as well (among many others) AGG does, afaik, aim more at very low level control and precision than at performance. (Besides, a AGG backend for Cairo is certain to be produced by someone, and this would probably also offer access to the low-level details in those points where you need them.)


April 27, 2005
> But Swing also is ugly and slow and looks out of place on every platform, so maybe you might want to choose another role model ;)

I know why Swing is slow.
D and differnet GUI architecture allow to avoid this.

"looks out of place on every platform"

Agreed. In Harmonia I am going to create
harmonia.themes.system.d theme which will use on
e.g. WinXP calls to uxtheme.dll to render basic widgets:
buttons, scrollbars, etc.
But again all widgets will be "harmonicas" inside.

Andrew.


"Benjamin Herr" <ben@0x539.de> wrote in message news:d4on3p$1mfg$1@digitaldaemon.com...
> Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
>> In fact choosen architecture (not to use system
>> controls/widgets at all, as in SWING) should follow
>> to high portability.
>
> But Swing also is ugly and slow and looks out of place on every platform, so maybe you might want to choose another role model ;)
>
> --ben


April 28, 2005
Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
> I don't think that antialiased rendering should be used everywhere.

There may be several things for which you don't need antialiased rendering. However, I can only think of GUI Widgets.

Images usually do need antialiased rendering. Pictures (as in camera shots), rotated, composited, transparent, or vector graphics -- all of these do actually need antialiased rendering.

For a "free flow" of "items" on the screen, most do actually need antialiasing. Even fonts, unless you use the (very few) Microsoft/Adobe owned ones. But they're not free. (As in beer.)

Also, do remember, that when screen resolutions exceed what one can see with plain eyes, then things like window borders, and the like, have to be defined in fractions of pixels (exceeding 1.0 pixels), to be usable at all. Also most of the motivation of using larger-than-the-minimum font sizes is actually due to wanting to use aliased fonts, not necessarily just "larger" fonts. (Thus erasing the virtues of a larger screen estate as such.)

---

Let's just say, that if antialiasing were invented years before lcd-screens, then everything would be antialiased. Then wed have (as standard issue) the user-definable Virtual Size. Thus, there'd be a slider, where you can zoom the entire screen, as if it were just a zoom view of a piece of paper, through an SLR camera.

Oh, and we _will_ get there -- very shortly. The fixed screen sizes, non-aliased window decorations, button borders, and System Fonts, all will vanish very shortly. The need is there, the means are there, all we need to wait for is the Recognition of that it's _both_ important, and possible right now.
April 28, 2005
> Images usually do need antialiased rendering. Pictures (as in camera shots), rotated, composited, transparent, or vector graphics -- all of these do actually need antialiased rendering.

Rotation and stretching of images by itself is sort of antialiasing. .... "composited, transparent" ... I have no idea how this is tied with antialiasing.

And only pure vector graphics - yes - do need antialiasing and on the
screen.
For this cases will be GraphicsEx.

> For a "free flow" of "items" on the screen, most do actually need antialiasing.

Could you give an example?

> Even fonts, unless you use the (very few) Microsoft/Adobe owned ones. But they're not free. (As in beer.)

ClearType (algorithm of font AA drawing) is not a property of the particular
font but rather method of font rendering. It is builtin in Windows and
in some flavours of Linux. Mac also has something.

> Also, do remember, that when screen resolutions exceed what one can see with plain eyes, then things like window borders, and the like, have to be defined in fractions of pixels (exceeding 1.0 pixels), to be usable at all.

??? I missed you here completely.
If screen will have more than 300DPI resolution it will not need AA drawing
nor subpixel positioning as size of pixels will be small enough to see
smooth picture.

Andrew.


"Georg Wrede" <georg.wrede@nospam.org> wrote in message news:42703177.40503@nospam.org...
> Andrew Fedoniouk wrote:
>> I don't think that antialiased rendering should be used everywhere.
>
> There may be several things for which you don't need antialiased rendering. However, I can only think of GUI Widgets.
>
> Images usually do need antialiased rendering. Pictures (as in camera shots), rotated, composited, transparent, or vector graphics -- all of these do actually need antialiased rendering.
>
> For a "free flow" of "items" on the screen, most do actually need antialiasing. Even fonts, unless you use the (very few) Microsoft/Adobe owned ones. But they're not free. (As in beer.)
>
> Also, do remember, that when screen resolutions exceed what one can see with plain eyes, then things like window borders, and the like, have to be defined in fractions of pixels (exceeding 1.0 pixels), to be usable at all. Also most of the motivation of using larger-than-the-minimum font sizes is actually due to wanting to use aliased fonts, not necessarily just "larger" fonts. (Thus erasing the virtues of a larger screen estate as such.)
>
> ---
>
> Let's just say, that if antialiasing were invented years before lcd-screens, then everything would be antialiased. Then wed have (as standard issue) the user-definable Virtual Size. Thus, there'd be a slider, where you can zoom the entire screen, as if it were just a zoom view of a piece of paper, through an SLR camera.
>
> Oh, and we _will_ get there -- very shortly. The fixed screen sizes, non-aliased window decorations, button borders, and System Fonts, all will vanish very shortly. The need is there, the means are there, all we need to wait for is the Recognition of that it's _both_ important, and possible right now.


April 29, 2005
We are there!!... Well, almost :)

You should really take a look at Luminocity, an experimental window manager being developed by the good folks at RedHat. It's best features are anti aliased vector widgets using Cairo, wobbly windows, zooming / panning on a 3D world using OpenGL.

Some preview videos and screenshots are available to download here:
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/xshots


Georg Wrede wrote:
> ...
> lcd-screens, then everything would be antialiased. Then wed have (as standard issue) the user-definable Virtual Size. Thus, there'd be a slider, where you can zoom the entire screen, as if it were just a zoom view of a piece of paper, through an SLR camera.
> 
> Oh, and we _will_ get there -- very shortly. The fixed screen sizes, non-aliased window decorations, button borders, and System Fonts, all will vanish very shortly. The need is there, the means are there, all we need to wait for is the Recognition of that it's _both_ important, and possible right now.
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