ctx rasterizer

The ctx vector rasterizer is an active edge table scanline rasterizer, with per-scanline choice of three different rasterization strategies.

The best case is when the slope of all scanlines crossing the scanline are steeper than 45 degrees. Where the aa for each coverage span has a single pixel of start/end aa.

The second best case is when all portions of AA in a scanline are linear ramps, and no edges interesecting, these scanlines comprise of three types spans, opaque, aa gradient and no coverage.

Scanlines where the number of active edges change within the scanline are rasterized with 15 level vertical oversampling, this is the fallback when other strategies fail us, and it is expensive - the algorithms worst case scanline. The rasterizer would be improved by use the area sum instead for this type of scanline as well as scanlines with many edges.

For an introduction to how scanline rasterizerization and vertical oversampling works oversampling works, which might prove useful in understanding the above explaination. See How the stb_truetype Anti-Aliased Software Rasterizer v2 Works.

Render targets handled natively are 8bit sRGBA RGBA8, floating point scRGB RGBAF 8bit and floating point grayscale with alpha. GRAYA8 and GRAYAF and floating point CMYK CMYKAF. Integration points are catered for in API and protocol for color management, which will be done with babl. The formats RGB332, RGB565, RGB565_BYTESWAPPED, CMYKA8, RGB8, GRAY1, GRAY2, GRAY4, GRAY8 and GRAYF are handled by converting processed scanlines back and forth to one of the supported targets. BGRA8 is handled by swapping components in the compositing source.

ctx supports grayscale, RGB and CMYK color models, all of which can be used and freely mixed while drawing. Conversion to the device/compositing representation is done during rasterization / rendering; at this point conversion between ICC matrix profiles for RGB spaces is currently supported when babl support is built in; making a hard-coded set of primaries known to match the specific display used - without babl - would be nice for microcontroller use.

The default RGB color space for both device and user is sRGB. Thus code from elsewhere specifying sRGB colors will work as expected. By adding an RGB matrix display profile in /tmp/ctx.icc the SDL,KMS and fbdev backends use the display space instead of sRGB for compositing.

optimization vs binary size

ctx is designed from the beginning to act as a software GPU for modern microcontrollers, some of which are more powerful than the PCs in the mid 90s. Ctx xan be tuned for microcontrollers down to ~7kb of RAM + 42kb of code + 12kb of fontdata, with further size reductions possible by reducing the featureset. There is abstractions in ctx for working with external retained framebuffers, where ctx keeps track of what is rendered and only issues redraws for the part of the framebuffer that is changing, the same hashing of drawing commands is used to manage muliple render threads in the SDL and KMS backends.

font data size:    18kb  (A sans font subsetted to only ASCII,
                                latin1 ~= 33kb )
RGBA8 rasterizer:  ~46kb (compiled with -Os, can triple in size with -O3)
ctx parser:        24kb  (not needed for direct use from C, but also
                          on embedded this can be useful for ease of
                          integration with other languages or directly
                          using ctx+mictrocontroller+display as a serial
                          display, the ctx parser is also a svg path data
                          parser.)

The RAM requirements are small and by tuning the engine to have only a couple of save/restore states, and paths with fewer than 256 edges, the total RAM footprint of the rasterizer can be as low as ~5kb on 32bit platforms when a display with retained framebuffer is used, the parser for the ctx protocol needs an additional 1kb.