[whatwg] Enabling LCD Text and antialiasing in canvas

[Stephen White]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 4:32 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert at ocallahan.org>wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 8:23 AM, Stephen White <senorblanco at chromium.org>wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 2:56 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert at ocallahan.org>wrote:
>>
>>> On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 7:53 AM, Stephen White <senorblanco at chromium.org
>>> > wrote:
>>>
>>>> All other canvas functionality behaves as normal, including operations
>>>> which modify the alpha values of the backing store.  However, any such
>>>> transparency values will be ignored when compositing the canvas into the
>>>> page, and the canvas will be treated as if every pixel has an alpha of 1.0.
>>>>
>>>
>>> That would mean getImageData can return non-1.0 alpha values, which is
>>> probably not what you want to implement.
>>>
>>
>> That's what Firefox/Linux does (in fact, it always seems to return 0.0
>> alpha from getImageData()).
>>
>
> We definitely shouldn't spec that! And I'm pretty sure that behavior would
> vary across Firefox platforms. But we need to have consistent behavior here.
>
>  I considered three options:
>>
>> 1)  Prevent non-1.0 alpha ever getting into the canvas.  At a minimum,
>> this would require the following:
>>
>>    - For putImageData, apply premultiplication, then write 1.0 alpha
>>    into the canvas.
>>    - Change initialization and clearRect() to clear to opaque black
>>    instead of transparent black.
>>    - Modify all canvas compositing modes to leave destination alpha
>>    unchanged
>>
>> The latter is easy to do in OpenGL and CoreGraphics, but hard to do in
>> Skia, and hard to do in accelerated CoreGraphics (IOSurfaces don't seem to
>> support any opaque formats, although I could be wrong -- that was just from
>> an hour or so of experimentation).  I'm not sure about Cairo.
>>
>
> You can always implement it slowly using readback. I think we should just
> spec this, and maybe note that authors shouldn't use non-over operators on
> opaque canvases. Over time we'll probably find a way to make it fast
> everywhere.
>

I'm a little leery of spec'ing something that has negative performance
implications.  As an example, the "darker" compositing mode was removed
from the spec due to hardware-accelerated performance concerns, IIRC.
 OTOH, unlike that change, this spec should not have performance
implications for OpenGL or Direct3D acceleration, only CoreGraphics via
IOSurface and skia (so far).

How would you feel about simply mapping the dest-alpha-modifying
compositing modes to source-over, as in proposal 2) above?

Stephen



>
> Rob
> --
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>