Useful links

There are no well-condensed sources of 2D graphics knowledge. Rather, it is dispersed over a wide number of blogs, pages, articles, and brains. This page attempts to collate links to some of this information.

History

• A brief history of 2D graphics is presented in this introduction for a course on digital typography.

• Font rendering is getting interesting

• Why are 2D vector graphics so much harder than 3D?

Blogs

• Mozilla gfx team (WebRender, design of 2D graphics APIs for the browser)

• nical's blog (Lyon, WebRender, general 2D graphics API design considerations)

• kvark's blog (WebRender, gfx-rs)

• pcwalton's blog (Pathfinder 3)

• raphlinus' blog (piet, 2D graphics API considerations, fonts, text rendering, splines, general 2D graphics API design considerations)

• behdad's page (harfbuzz, fonts, text rendering)

2D Graphics API design

• raphlinus: "A crate I want: 2d graphics"

• nical: Following up on the 2d graphics in Rust discussion

Rust 2D or 3D libs (that aren't kurbo)

• euclid and lyon_geom

• arcs by Michael-F-Bryan

2D antialiasing and font rasterization

Trapezoidal pixel coverage algorithm

• How the stb_truetype Anti-Aliased Software Rasterizer v2 Works

• raphlinus: Inside the fastest fontest renderer in the world

• (Skia/Spinel team members) Path rendering by counting pixel coverage

Other

• Texts Rasterization Exposures: An attempt to improve text rasterization algorithms using only publicly available information

• The Raster Tragedy at Low-Resolution Revisited: Opportunities and Challenges beyond “Delta-Hinting” ("RL: ...a justification for why Microsoft made exactly the choices they did 10+ years ago...")

Gamma Correction

• What every coder should know about gamma

• Wikipedia

Papers on approaches to efficient rendering of 2D graphics

• (2014) (Ganacim, Lima, de Figueiredo, Nehab) Massively-Parallel Vector Graphics

• (2017) (Lengyel) GPU-Centered Font Rendering Directly from Glyph Outlines (Slug Font Rendering Library)

• (2016) (Li, Hou, Zhou) Efficient GPU Path Rendering Using Scanline Rasterization

Other links on approaches to efficient rendering of 2D graphics

• Blend 2D - Innovations (HN discussion)

• thetamath.com - Easy Scalable Text Rendering on the GPU

• nical's Google doc on Pathfinder 3

Mathematics

• Inclusion of a Point in a Polygon (winding number)

• 2D graphics rendering course

Repositories of interest

• makepad (immediate mode 2D graphics)

• spinel (hyper-optimized, Vulkan 1.1 2D graphics)

• nanovg

• piet-metal (experimental compute approach to 2D graphics)

• pathfinder (pcwalton's Pathfinder 3)

• webrender (Mozilla gfx team's WebRender)

• glyphy (behdad's signed distance field approach to font rendering)

• msdfgen (multi-channel signed distance field generator)

xi-org Zulip discussions of interest

• makepad

• Conflation artifacts

• Thoughts on piet-metal

• gpu stream