Re: Heated agreement? (was) Re: Canvas shortcomings

[Nathan Hurst <njh hawthorn csse monash edu au>]

Sorry to keep going...

On Tue, 19 Jun 2001, Mark wrote:

> > I would suggest that we put SVP rendering into the XRender extension.  We
> > then can do pretty much anything that pdf 1.4 can do, but with the
> > significant speed advantages that a presorted polyline set gives.
> 
> As I understand the SVP (sorted vector path) is an optimization for
> scan-line rendering. Does it have good properties for teslation too?

The most common way to find a tessellation is to convert a polygon into a
monotonic polygons(SVP) and generate the obvious tessellation from that.

> Also XRender is meant as an abstraction of acceleration present in
> hardware, so maybe that should be done as an extention?

XRender provides Trapezoids, which SVPs decompose into very easily.  And
SVP is a more efficient encoding than a string of trapezoids.

njh