canvas_ity
stb
canvas_ity | stb | |
---|---|---|
7 | 164 | |
318 | 25,128 | |
- | - | |
2.5 | 6.4 | |
2 months ago | 3 days ago | |
C++ | C | |
ISC License | GNU General Public License v3.0 or later |
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canvas_ity
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Writing a TrueType font renderer
I have a small TTF implementation that's in the neighborhood of that size and is open source. It's part of my canvas_ity single-header library [0] that's around 2300 LOC / 36 KB object size and implements a C++ version of most of the 2D HTML5 canvas spec [1].
The core implementation of the TTF parsing and drawing is in L1526-L1846 with another small bit at L3205-L3274 of src/canvas_ity.hpp.
It's something of a toy implementation that only supports western left-to-right text, and doesn't do any hinting at all, nor kerning, nor shaping. But it's enough to draw a basic "Hello world!" using any typical TTF file.
The test suite in test/test.cpp L84-304 embeds a few custom Base64-encoded TTF files. They're small and only have a few glyphs but they do exercise a number of interesting edge cases in the OpenType TTF spec [2]. Have a look at the HTML5 port of the test suite at test/test.html in different browsers to see how their canvas implementations render those fonts.
[0] https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity
[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/2015/REC-2dcontext-20151119/
[2] https://standards.iso.org/ittf/PubliclyAvailableStandards/c0...
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The Lone Developer Problem
Agreed, that sort of documentation is pure gold when done well.
It's something I always try to pay forward by doing in my own code. For example, one of my own solo projects was an STB-style single-header -like rasterizer library for C++. I started the implementation half of the library with a short outline of the rendering pipeline's dataflow and the top-level functions responsible for each stage:
https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity/blob/f32fbb37e2fe7c0fcae...
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Ask HN: What have you created that deserves a second chance on HN?
https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity
This is an STB-style single-header C++ library with no dependencies beyond the standard C++ library. In about 2300 lines of 78-column code (not counting blanks or comments), or 1300 semicolons, it implements an API based on the basic W3C specification to draw 2D vector graphics into an image buffer:
- Strokes and fills (with antialiasing and gamma-correct blending)
- Linear and radial gradients
- Patterns (with repeat modes and bi-cubic resampling)
- Line caps and line joins (handling high curvature)
- Dash patterns and dash offsets
- Transforms
- Lines, quadratic and cubic Beziers, arcs, and rectangles
- Text (very basic, but does its own TTF font file parsing!)
- Raster images (i.e., sprites)
- Clipping (via masking)
- Compositing modes (Porter-Duff)
- Drop shadows with Gaussian blurs
I also uncovered a number of interesting browser quirks along the way with the HTML5 port of my testing suite.
- Hello, PNG
- A tiny, single-header -like 2D rasterizer for C++
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canvas_ity - A tiny, single-header <canvas>-like 2D rasterizer
Repository: https://github.com/a-e-k/canvas_ity
- Show HN: Canvas_ity – A tiny, single-header -like 2D rasterizer for C++
stb
- Lessons learned about how to make a header-file library (2013)
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Nebula is an open-source and free-to-use modern C++ game engine
Have you considered not using an engine at all, in favor of libraries? There are many amazing libraries I've used for game development - all in C/C++ - that you can piece together:
* General: [stb](https://github.com/nothings/stb)
- STB: Single-file public domain libraries for C/C++
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Writing a TrueType font renderer
Great to see more accessible references on font internals. I have dabbled on this a bit last year and managed to have a parser and render the points of a glyph's contour (I stopped before Bezier and shape filling stuff). I still have not considered hinting, so it's nice that it's covered. What helped me was an article from the Handmade Network [1] and the source of stb_truetype [2] (also used in Dear ImGUI).
[1] https://handmade.network/forums/articles/t/7330-implementing....
[2] https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h
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Capturing the WebGPU Ecosystem
So I read through the materials on mesh shaders and work graphs and looked at sample code. These won't really work (see below). As I implied previously, it's best to research/discuss these sort of matters with professional graphics programmers who have experience actually using the technologies under consideration.
So for the sake of future web searchers who discover this thread: there are only two proven ways to efficiently draw thousands of unique textures of different sizes with a single draw call that are actually used by experienced graphics programmers in production code as of 2023.
Proven method #1: Pack these thousands of textures into a texture atlas.
Proven method #2: Use bindless resources, which is still fairly bleeding edge, and will require fallback to atlases if targeting the PC instead of only high end console (Xbox Series S|X...).
Mesh shaders by themselves won't work: These have similar texture access limitations to the old geometry/tessellation stage they improve upon. A limited, fixed number of textures still must be bound before each draw call (say, 16 or 32 textures, not 1000s), unless bindless resources are used. So mesh shaders must be used with an atlas or with bindless resources.
Work graphs by themselves won't work: This feature is bleeding edge shader model 6.8 whereas bindless resources are SM 6.6. (Xbox Series X|S might top out at SM 6.7, I can't find an authoritative answer.) It looks like work graphs might only work well on nVidia GPUs and won't work well on Intel GPUs anytime soon (but, again, I'm not knowledgeable enough to say this authoritatively). Furthermore, this feature may have a hard dependency on using bindless to begin with. That is, I can't tell if one is allowed to execute a work graph that binds and unbinds individual texture resources. And if one could do such a thing, it would certainly be slower than using bindless. The cost of bindless is paid "up front" when the textures are uploaded.
Some programmers use Texture2DArray/GL_TEXTURE_2D_ARRAY as an alternative to atlases but two limitations are (1) the max array length (e.g. GL_MAX_ARRAY_TEXTURE_LAYERS) might only be 256 (e.g. for OpenGL 3.0), (2) all textures must be the same size.
Finally, for the sake of any web searcher who lands on this thread in the years to come, to pack an atlas well a good packing algorithm is needed. It's harder to pack triangles than rectangles but triangles use atlas memory more efficiently and a good triangle packing will outperform the fancy new bindless rendering. Some open source starting points for packing:
https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_rect_pack.h
https://github.com/ands/trianglepacker
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Www Which WASM Works
The STB headers are mostly built like that: https://github.com/nothings/stb
You could also add an optional 'convenience API' over the lower-level flexible-but-inconvenient core API, as long as core library can be compiled on its own.
In essence it's just a way to decouple the actually important library code from runtime environment details which might be better implemented outside the C/C++ stdlib.
It's already as simple as the stdlib IO functions not being asynchrononous while many operating systems provide more modern alternatives. For a specific type of library (such an image decoder) it's often better to delegate such details to the library user instead of circumventing the stdlib and talking directly to OS APIs.
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File for Divorce from LLVM
My stuff for instance:
https://github.com/floooh/sokol
...inspired by:
https://github.com/nothings/stb
But it's not so much about the build system, but requiring a separate C/C++ compiler toolchain (Rust needs this, Zig currently does not - unless the proposal is implemented).
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What C libraries do you use the most?
STB Libraries: https://github.com/nothings/stb
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[Noob Question] How do C programmers get around not having hash maps?
stb_ds is also very popular.
- Is there an existing multidimensional hash table implementation in C?
What are some alternatives?
nanovgXC - Lightweight vector graphics library implementing exact-coverage antialiasing in OpenGL
Vcpkg - C++ Library Manager for Windows, Linux, and MacOS
tinf - Tiny inflate library (inflate, gzip, zlib)
imgui-node-editor - Node Editor built using Dear ImGui
Tephra - A modern, high-performance C++17 graphics and compute library based on Vulkan
ZXing - ZXing ("Zebra Crossing") barcode scanning library for Java, Android
art - @Bigfan/art is a React custom renderer for HTML5 Canvas.
freetype-gl - OpenGL text using one vertex buffer, one texture and FreeType
osxphotos - Python app to work with pictures and associated metadata from Apple Photos on macOS. Also includes a package to provide programmatic access to the Photos library, pictures, and metadata.
ImageMagick - 🧙♂️ ImageMagick 7
fpng - Super fast C++ .PNG writer/reader
Cppcheck - static analysis of C/C++ code