Announcing printerd

Posted May 24, 2012 0:26 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: Announcing printerd by nybble41
Parent article: Announcing printerd

Shaders?! You do realise that most printers are used mostly to print text, or bitmap representations of text, and that rendering text via shaders is insanely resource-expensive?

Like it or not, there's going to be either a bitmap or a vector language (or, more likely, both) in any plausible printer for a very long time to come.

Announcing printerd

Posted May 24, 2012 2:53 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

I'm talking about vertex and fragment shaders, in OpenGL terms, not generating text via shader programs. The scene graph would include the text as references to glyphs, and any required bitmaps in the form of textures. The shaders would be handling transparency, gradients, smooth scaling, and other visual effects, just as with rendering to a display.