Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 5th Dec 2012 16:56 UTC, submitted by estherschindler
"For two decades, X has been the foundation for Linux graphics. Ubuntu's decision late in 2010 to switch to Wayland shakes things up all the way to those roots. Just over a month ago, the official 1.0.0 release of Wayland appeared, as well as its associated Weston project. How will these milestones affect working GUI programmers? What will happen to all the existing toolkits - Qt, wxWindows, Tk, and others - on which so many graphical applications already depend?"
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RE[2]: X's era is in the past
by jonsmirl on Wed 5th Dec 2012 22:57
in reply to "RE: X's era is in the past"
Member since:2005-07-06
I'm no Mac expert so I don't know what they are up to. The basic concept is to download TTF fonts (probably preprocessed) into the GPU. You then give the GPU a string of text and a rectangle in your coordinate system. As that rectangle is transformed by the display system the GPU would generate the best text possible (including subpixel rendering) without application involvement.
This is not giving the GPU a texture with the glyphs on it and then scaling. The GPU has the equations for the fonts, transforms those equations and then draws with subpixel antialiasing.
The problem being addressed is that apps can't do the antialaising if the window is going to be transformed in any way. Slightly transform the app's antialiased window and all of the antialiasing gets broken. We need a scheme where the drawing system does the transformation based antialiasing without application interaction.
There have about ten papers written on this subject but I didn't know anyone has deployed it.
Edited 2012-12-05 23:02 UTC
RE[3]: X's era is in the past
by Morgan on Thu 6th Dec 2012 00:00
in reply to "RE[2]: X's era is in the past"
Member since:2005-06-29
RE[3]: X's era is in the past
by zima on Thu 6th Dec 2012 09:32
in reply to "RE[2]: X's era is in the past"
Member since:2005-07-06
Reading "One technology that hasn't happened yet is GPU based glyph generation. When that happens it will likely have a large impact on the desktop" reminded me about Matrox Parhelia - though it was much simpler ("Glyph acceleration, where anti-aliasing of text was accelerated by the hardware" from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrox_Parhelia )
But still, what "large impact on the desktop" do you envision?
Features
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OSNews is a sponsor of this year's O'Reilly OSCON in Portland, Oregon, USA. A lucky OSNews reader will win a free three-day pass, including two tutorials days. To win the pass, post a comment on this story saying something about Open Source Software or OSCON. We'll pick a winner at random next week. If you don't have an OSNews account, you may email us your entry. Part of the conference is the 9th annual Open Source Awards, and today the 16th is the deadline for nominations. If you'd like to nominate an outstanding open source contributor, do it here. Read on for more information about OSCON. Update: The 20% discount code for OSNews readers is "OSN."
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/24/13 22:24 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 04/18/13 11:21 UTC
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Member since:
2005-06-29
I thought this was exactly what Apple did in OS X with Core Text, Quartz 2D and Quartz Extreme?