[OpenJDK Rasterizer] Some questions

[Jim Graham]

Hopefully you've all had time to read my getting started message.  Now 
some details on where we might go from here.

We're continuing to work on getting the Pisces renderer into shape to 
have it potentially be the long-term replacement for our encumbered 
Ductus binary plug, but that effort will take a little more time.

In the meantime, yesterday I hacked up a quick AA rasterizer replacement 
just to see if we could get something simple and expedient in place to 
disencumber our sources.  It is a small piece of code, but it isn't the 
best performing alternative.  I basically render the path at N times 
larger into a Region, similar to the way we turn a Shape into a clipping 
Region, and then generate tiles of alpha coverage from the Region at 
about the same relative size as the tiles that were generated by the 
Ductus code (32x32 pixels at a time).

I can get anywhere from 50% down to 10% of the performance of the Ductus 
binary plug with this code at 16x16 oversampling - which is similar 
quality to what the encumbered library produces.  If I drop it down to 
4x4 oversampling the performance gets up to about 30% to 70% of the 
binary plug at the expense of some rendering quality.  The variations in 
performance relate to the complexity of the path and how much area it 
covers.

What I think I'd like to do at this point is to create a pluggable 
interface and use this quick and dirty solution as a temporary open 
source plug for AA rendering in order to get our code more buildable 
sooner rather than later so that others could start contributing towards 
the eventual replacement.  It may not have the best performance, but it 
doesn't represent a lot of work that may eventually be obsoleted by the 
community and it gets us weaned off of the closed sources quicker.

The remaining work then would be to create a "quick and dirty" line 
widener that plugs into the rest of our code reasonably well.  I can 
talk more about that in another message.

Any thoughts on getting this quick and dirty AA plugin out in the public 
sources sooner vs. waiting for a replacement that might have more longer 
term potential?

Is anyone out there already looking at AA rendering alternatives that 
they want to plug into the OpenJDK sources?

			...jim