Re: [whatwg] Antialiasing of line widths < 1 (was Re: Blurry lines in 2D Canvas (and SVG))

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 7:50 AM, Glenn Maynard <glenn@zewt.org> wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Stephen White <senorblanco@chromium.org>wrote:
>
>> Chrome (well, Skia actually) uses a "hairline" mode for line widths < 1.
>> It draws a line of width 1, and uses the width to modulate the alpha.  I
>> think the idea is to prevent blotchiness/unevenness caused by undersampling
>> or missed coverage (Skia uses 16 samples of AA).
>>
>
> That sounds like it should be fine, since it should give results similar
> to what users would expect from simple coverage antialiasing.
>
> I'm not sure that's what I'm seeing, though.  http://jsfiddle.net/eZEyH/1/
> The 0.001 width stroke is being drawn solid black in the pixel-centered
> (left) case.  In the right one, horizontally aligned to the edge of a
> pixel, the stroke disappears.  (I left it vertically pixel-centered, so the
> box didn't disappear entirely.)  The right is what I'd expect to always
> happen with a lineWidth that thin.  Similar things happen with thicker
> widths, the 0.001 just makes it very easy to see.
>

That is clearly a bug. :-)


>
> This can become visible during animation, eg. http://jsfiddle.net/xSUuB/1/.
> In Chrome, the line flickers between solid black and grey.  In Firefox,
> it's antialiased normally, so it consistently appears grey (actually
> shifting between one pixel of grey and two pixels of lighter grey).
>

Yeah. Chrome seems to flip between no AA and AA which sounds like a bug in
their algorithm.