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

On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Stephen White <senorblanco@chromium.org>wrote:

> I think one problem you might run into is that, if you consider a stroked
> line to be centered on pixel centers rather than pixel edges, then the same
> path when filled and stroked would touch different pixels along each edge.
>
> Consider a 10x10 rectangle, drawn at coordinates coordinates 5, 5. If
> filled, this would fill pixels 5-14 in X and 5-14 in Y. If stroked, this
> will draw 1-pixel wide rectangles centered along (5, 5) -> (14, 5) -> (14,
> 14) -> (5, 5). With antialiasing this will touch pixels 4->15 in each
> dimension.  http://jsfiddle.net/6KS4V/
>
> If the stroke was instead drawn centered over half pixels, the stroked
> rects would be centered along (5.5, 5.5) -> (14.5, 5.5) -> (14.5, 14.5) ->
> (14.5, 5.5) -> (5.5, 5.5). This would touch pixels 5->15 in each dimension.
> If drawn with transparency, the resulting left and top edges would look
> different than the bottom and right edges.  E.g.,
> http://jsfiddle.net/9xbkX/.
>
> (Please ignore blurriness induced by the CSS upscaling; you can remove the
> CSS and use a zooming tool if you prefer).
>
>
Yes, I agree that strokes and fills should be treated the same to avoid
this problem.
I'm unsure if Glenn's suggestion for an outer and inner stroke fix the
problem. An inner or outer stroke will look very different. In addition if
the corners of the path don't align with the grid, you will get a blurry
outline again.

As an experiment, I drew 4 rectangles in JSFiddle with stroke width of .5,
.75, 1, 1.5 and 2: http://jsfiddle.net/6KS4V/2/
I aligned them to the grid as Glenn suggested.
This is a blown up screenshot from IE (Firefox looked the same):
http://bit.ly/16FVCKd
and here's one from Chrome: http://bit.ly/19Tf9Ko

The rectangle that's 2 points wide is somewhat blurry, but the one that is
1.5  is very bad.
Chrome seems ignore stroke widths that are smaller than 1 (which is
reasonable).

I then recreated the content in Illustrator, opened the file in Acrobat and
took a screenshot: http://bit.ly/15loBhu
As you can see, Acrobat doesn't apply any anti-aliasing. It seems to 'snap'
the points to the grid and adjust the stroke width so it fills whole
pixels. I ran some experiments and I *think* this is also what CSS does.

I believe that this could be accomplished with a new attribute in the
graphics state. Doing it programmatically should also work but is quite
difficult.
I wonder if our mozilla friends that work on shumway and pdf.js are running
into this...

Received on Saturday, 10 August 2013 00:16:30 UTC