- From: Philip Taylor <excors+whatwg@gmail.com>
- Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2007 21:19:47 +0100
Lines are great fun. See http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/misc/lines.html for a random collection of demonstrations relating to the stuff below. For lineJoin, the term "joins" is used but not properly defined (except indirectly as "where two lines meet"). Given the implementations, this should be something like: """ For each subpath, a join exists at the point shared by each consecutive pair of lines. If the subpath is closed, then a join also exists at its first point (equivalent to its last point) connecting the first and last lines in the subpath. """ There are no conformance criteria for rendering lineCap. The definition of 'miter' is incorrect: it seems to say the miter gets truncated into a more-sided polygon if it would exceed miterLimit, but the behaviour of implementations is to revert to 'bevel' rendering instead. The definition of 'round' for lineJoin is slightly incorrect, since it talks about adding a filled arc when it needs to be a filled circle sector (or an arc plus a triangle). The definition for 'stroke' says "The stroke() method must stroke each subpath of the current path in turn, using the strokeStyle, lineWidth, lineJoin, and (if appropriate) miterLimit attributes". That list should include lineCap. "The lineWidth attribute gives the default width of lines, in coordinate space units." - why "default"? The expression "the point where the inside edges of the lines touch" doesn't make sense to me. (Actually, it did make sense for a while, but then I realised it was an incorrect sense). I think the problem is in being ambiguous about the distinction between geometric lines (which are infinitely thin and just a description of a path through space) and graphical lines (which are a thick filled shape, defined by their edges (which are geometric lines)) - the rendering details are describing how to convert the first sort of line into the second sort of line, but that seems to be made unclear. I believe it would be clearer to use the term "line" only in the first sense (so ctx.lineTo adds a line to the subpath, and ctx.fill fills the area enclosed by the path's lines, etc), and the term "stroke" [or a better name, since I don't really like this one, but I can't think of anything else] for the second sense (so ctx.stroke calculates and renders strokes, which are shapes that are based on the path's lines and widths and caps and joins). There also seems to be a danger of confusion between lines (like a single straight/arc/B?zier line segment) and subpaths, like in the definition of what lineCap applies to. So perhaps it could say something like: """ The lineWidth attribute gives the width used for rendering lines, in coordinate space units. The outline of a rendered stroke must pass through the points at a distance lineWidth/2 perpendicular to each point in the line being stroked, and must be closed at each end by a straight line. [[...because it's good to define what the width actually means, though I'm not sure if this definition is sufficiently clear/correct.]] ... The lineCap attribute defines the type of endings that UAs shall place on the end of lines. The three valid values are butt, round, and square. The butt value means that no cap shape will be added to the lines. [[...since you don't have to do anything extra at this stage - the earlier paragraph already said how to close the lines at the ends in a butt-like way.]] The round value means that a semi-circle with the diameter equal to the line width must be added on to the first and last points of each unclosed subpath. [[It needs to ignore closed subpaths - those get joined instead of capped.]] The square value means that a rectangle with the length of the line width and the width of half the line width must be placed flat against the edge perpendicular to the direction of the line, on the first and last points of each unclosed subpath. ... ... At each join, if the two lines connected to the join have the same direction at that point, no line join is rendered. If the two lines have exactly opposite directions, and lineJoin is round, then a filled semi-circle must be added with its diameter equal to the line width, its origin at the join, and its flat edge touching the edges of the strokes; otherwise, when lineJoin is not round, no line is rendered. [[It won't make sense to talk about the outside edges at a join if all the edges are parallel, so these cases need to be handled specially. It also avoids issues like the miter trying to find an intersection point between parallel lines.]] Otherwise, if the two lines do not have equal or opposite directions, the following rendering steps are performed for the join: * A filled triangle must be added between the position of the join and the two corners of the strokes on the outside of the join. [[That triangular region is shared for all the following variations, so it seems easier to describe it as separate step.]] [[Things like "outside of the join" are not defined but seem clear enough to me.]] * If the value is bevel, then no extra rendering is needed. * If the value is round, then UAs must add a filled arc connecting the corners of the strokes on the outside of the join, with the arc's diameter equal to the line width and with its origin at the point of the join. * If the value is miter, then the intersection point P of the two tangents to the edges of the strokes on the outside of the join is calculated. If the distance from P to the join is greater than or equal to the miter limit ratio multiplied by the line width, then no extra rendering is needed. Otherwise, a triangle must be added between P and the corners of the strokes on the outside of the join. The final stroke shape of a path is the union of the line strokes, line caps and line joins for all of its subpaths. [[In particular, there's no non-zero winding number rule. Also, subpaths aren't drawn separately - they're just combined into one shape which then gets filled and composited.]] ...much later... The stroke() method must calculate the final stroke shape of the current path, using the lineWidth, lineJoin, lineCap, and (if appropriate) miterLimit attributes, and then fill this shape using the strokeStyle attribute. """ (Hopefully there aren't too many errors in there.) (Is it worth having diagrams (kind of like http://canvex.lazyilluminati.com/misc/linejoin.png), so normal people can tell what the interesting bits here actually mean? Or is that best left for tutorials and user reference guides?) There are some other issues I'm currently aware of, possibly requiring more complexity: What happens when a stroked path has zero length, in terms of drawing the line caps/joins? In particular, square caps are impossible because the line does not have a defined direction (assuming we're not having dashed paths for now). In Firefox 2 and Opera, nothing is drawn for zero-length paths. In Firefox 3 and Safari, round caps/joins are drawn (because the direction of the line doesn't matter in that case, so the output is well-defined), and nothing else is drawn. What happens when a stroked path contains a line with zero length, between non-zero-length lines? As far as I can tell, zero-length lines never have any effect (e.g. line-joins get drawn between two non-consecutive non-zero-length lines if they have only zero-length lines between them, so the earlier suggestion for defining 'join' is wrong) - except when the path has no non-zero-length lines in it, in which case the presence of a zero-width line causes round caps to be drawn in FF3/Safari. (...except in FF3 when it's a zero-length quadratic/B?zier curve). Maybe it'd be best just to require that lines with zero length are never added to the subpath - so if you don't add any non-zero-length ones, the subpath will be empty and won't get drawn, which is slightly incompatible with Safari/FF3 but hopefully easy to fix in them, and compatible with Opera/FF2. -- Philip Taylor excors at gmail.com
Received on Tuesday, 19 June 2007 13:19:47 UTC