[whatwg] Enabling LCD Text and antialiasing in canvas

[Stephen White]

On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 12:32 PM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 2:59 AM, Stephen White <senorblanco at chromium.org>wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 11:35 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert at ocallahan.org
>> > wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 5:16 PM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier at gmail.com>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Looking at the WebKit implementation, I'm unsure how 'opaque' can
>>>> implemented for accelerated canvas. It might work with non-accelerated
>>>> canvas but would have to run some experiments.
>>>> I also look at mozilla's Core Graphics implementation and unless I'm
>>>> missing something, it doesn't have special code to handle 'opaque'. When do
>>>> you use this parameter?
>>>>
>>>
>>> CanvasRenderingContext2D::GetSurfaceFormat is part of the process. That
>>> selects a surface format that is passed down to the graphics layer when
>>> creating the canvas surface. It's true that we don't currently do anything
>>> with that when drawing with CoreGraphics. That would need to be cleaned up
>>> before we started promoting this feature.
>>>
>>> Now that you mention it, having to modify the definition of compositing
>>> is a bit of a bummer for the 'opaque' attribute approach. I think we could
>>> do everything we want using your approach --- internally keeping a flag to
>>> indicate whether the alpha values of the canvas are all 1, setting it when
>>> the canvas is filled with a solid color and clearing it when non-over
>>> drawing (or clear()) are used. Let's try that!
>>>
>>
>> I think this is difficult to do in the general case, such as
>> putImageData() or drawImage() or patterns, since you would need to examine
>> all the pixels of the source image to determine if they contain non-1
>> alpha.  This would be cost-prohibitive.
>>
>
> You only have to do that if you use compositing modes such as source-in
> though.
>

putImageData() ignores compositing mode, though, so it would always have to
be treated as alpha-modifying. If you declare with moz-opaque that the
canvas is opaque, you can still apply the optimization even with
putImageData().

In addition, you could detect at low cost that the CanvasImageSource is
> opaque so some compositing modes would not reset.
>

Not always.  For example, a partially-loaded bitmap has to be treated as
non-opaque until fully loaded, IIRC. And for canvas-to-canvas draws, you'd
be applying the same conservative algorithm that determined the opacity of
the source canvas, so it might miss some optimization cases that an
explicit declaration wouldn't.


> If it's just for the purposes of optimization, you could be conservative
>> and simply clear the flag when there's the potential for (but not certainty
>> of) non-1 alpha.  But if you're also using that flag to allow subpixel AA,
>> the behaviour becomes quite unpredictable for the web developer and hard to
>> spec crisply.
>>
>
> Yes, that is worrisome. It seems another flag is in ordre.
>
>
>>
>> We could consider separating the two concepts again.  In an earlier
>> thread, there was an attempt to automatically determine all the places
>> where it's safe to enabled subpixel AA, but that seemed to result in a
>> complex implementation, with all cases still not being covered (such as
>> canvas-to-canvas drawImage()). The other alternative is programmatic
>> control over subpixel AA, using a context attribute. That was the first
>> thing that Justin proposed in the earlier thread, and would be my
>> preference as well (a fully-loaded footgun:  you can shoot yourself with
>> it, but the behaviour and performance characteristics are very easy to
>> understand and spec).  But there didn't seem to be agreement around that
>> either.
>>
>
> Can you refresh me on the issue with that? Is the cost too high?
>

Robert's comment:

> We'd have to define what happens when you use subpixel antialiasing "inco
rrectly",
> because we can be pretty sure authors will use it incorrectly and expect
to get interoperable behavior.

Ian Hickson's comment earlier in this thread:

> Do we have any reason to believe the majority of authors would make the
> right decisions here?
>
> (The main reason we haven't provided control over things like
antialiasing
> is that many authors tend to make terribly bad decisions.) (Before anyone
> gets offended, by the way: that you are reading this almost guarantees
> that you are above average in terms of authoring ability.)


>
>>
>> Which is how I ended up at the "moz-opaque" flag.  it restricts canvas to
>> the subset of operations which result in a 1 alpha in the backing store, to
>> allow optimizations and the use of subpixel AA.  I think that is actually
>> quite a useful subset (generally, the subset that doesn't need destination
>> alpha).  I believe the same thing can be achieved in WebGL by setting the
>> "alpha" attribute to false in WebGLContextAttributes.
>>
>
> My fear is that this is too disruptive as it changes how canvas
> compositing works.
>

It's opt-in, so it wouldn't affect existing content.


> It might also not be implemented easily on all platforms (especially the
> ones that use the operating system to draw)
>

It's pretty straightforward to implement with OpenGL:  allocate the backing
store as GL_RGB instead of GL_RGBA, or (if unsupported) clear the buffer to
opaque black and use glColorMask() to disable alpha writes.  Then for speed
during page compositing, disable blending.

Stephen

>
>
>>
>>
>>> But I think "matte" is unnecessarily obscure. How about adding a
>>> clear(DOMString) method that does a 'copy' of the color to the entire
>>> canvas buffer? The color could default to rgba(0,0,0,0).
>>>
>>>
>>> Rob
>>> --
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>>> lbh zhfg or lbhe freinag, naq jubrire jnagf gb or svefg zhfg or lbhe fynir
>>> — whfg nf gur Fba bs Zna qvq abg pbzr gb or freirq, ohg gb freir, naq gb
>>> tvir uvf yvsr nf n enafbz sbe znal.” [Znggurj 20:25-28]
>>>
>>
>>
>