Re: [Gzz] xupdf direction: please read

[Tuomas Lukka]

On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 08:53:19PM +0100, Benja Fallenstein wrote:
> 
> I'm not clear what, for each of these options, we can expect in the 
> direction of:
> - text legibility
> - performance
> 
> If either is likely to improve legibility and not expected to degrade 
> performance drastically at the same time, I'd say that's the one to go 
> for :-)

The reading of PDF as sets of characters would improve legibility
when zooming in; when zoomed out, both should be about the same.
Performance may suffer with this approach, though. I'm choosing 
the image approach for now, in order to get things finished in time.

        Tuomas

> Tuomas Lukka wrote:
> >I'm up against a very difficult decision w.r.t. xupdf direction before
> >the HT03 article.
> >
> >The question is whether to
> >
> >1) devote significant time and effort into making the handling of the large
> >images practical at the necessary speeds; caching, lazy loading etc.
> >
> >     - we need this anyway for photographs etc, but not quite
> >       yet
> >     - this is rather tricky, forcing to spend time tuning
> >       memory management and caching algorithms
> >     
> >
> >2) devote significant time and effort into rendering the PDF (or possibly
> >some version made easier through hacking xpdf and writing semi-parsed
> >output) by direct OpenGL commands, i.e. "render this textured rectangle
> >here" for a single letter.
> >
> >     - this might lower the performance or not; hard to say yet
> >     - might be able to make good use of vertex shaders
> >     - we want text rendering to be fast anyway
> >     - might be quite tricky to get the images and fonts right;
> >       OTOH might be easier than I think
> >
> >As you can see, both have large pros and cons. So I'd like to ask for
> >your opinions. The hardest is that I'm not at all sure which one
> >will need greater effort and which one will be more useful.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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