[whatwg] Blurry lines in 2D Canvas (and SVG)

[Glenn Maynard]

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 11:56 PM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier at gmail.com> wrote:

>  This happens because you offset 1 pixel and then draw a half pixel stroke
>>> on each side. Since it covers only half the pixel, the color gets mapped
>>> to
>>> 50% gray.
>>> You can work around this by doing an extra offset of half the
>>> devicepixelratio,
>>
>>
>> For Canvas, you should always add 0.5, since you're in the canvas
>> coordinate space, before the pixel ratio is applied.
>>
>
> That seemed like an OK idea until I thought about it some more.
> Doing a .5 scale will also affect your fills so a rect will now have
> aliased borders.
>

I meant you always want to add 0.5 to offsets, not ratio / 2.  On a device
with a pixel ratio of 2, you still want to add 0.5, not 1.

You want to add 0.5 if you're drawing a 1px stroke, so the rect ends at 0.5
and the stroke extends to the edge of the pixel at 0.  If you're drawing a
filled rect with no stroke, you don't want to add 0.5, so the rect itself
goes to the edge of the pixel rather than the stroke.

I agree this isn't all that obvious.  What if there was an option for
strokes to align themselves to the inside or outside of the path, instead
of centering over the path?  That way, drawing 5x5-10x10 would cause both
the stroke and the edge of the fill to be pixel-aligned.  This is
Photoshop's "Position" stroke option, which can be set to "inside",
"outside" or "center".  I don't know if that makes sense with the way paths
work, and it would make the stroke's path dependent on its width.

Also adjusting for non-round device pixel ratio or as Kornel mentions,
> having transforms will still result in blurry lines (unless you do a bunch
> of math)
>

Do you mean Canvas transforms or higher-level transforms, like CSS
scaling?  I don't think Canvas can help with the latter.

Non-integer pixel ratios lead to all kinds of aliasing and quality
problems.  I suspect trying to fix them is futile...


> I agree that we can't change this, but maybe we can add something to make
> it better.
>
> In PDF there is a feature called "strokeAdjust" that will make the stroke
> align to pixel boundaries. I've attached a drawing that shows the feature.
> Basically, if you turn it on and the stroke doesn't fill the entire pixel,
> that pixel isn't drawn.
> Apple has a Core Graphics function called "CGGStateSetStrokeAdjust" so at
> least they would be able to implement this easily. :-)
>

Isn't this simply disabling antialiasing?  That's what the illustration
seems to show.

That'll work in certain cases, with the caveats that have been mentioned:
you don't want it when animating lines, for diagonals, if you have rounded
corners, etc.

-- 
Glenn Maynard