Pathfinder 3 is a fast, practical, GPU-based rasterizer for fonts and vector graphics using OpenGL 3.0+, OpenGL ES 3.0+, WebGL 2, and Metal.
Please note that Pathfinder is under heavy development and is incomplete in various areas.
Pathfinder contains a library that implements a subset of the
HTML canvas API. You can quickly add
vector rendering to any Rust app with it. The library is available on crates.io. See
examples/canvas_minimal for a small example of usage.
Demo app sources are available in demo/. A prebuilt package for Magic Leap can be found in releases.
The project features:
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High quality antialiasing. Pathfinder can compute exact fractional trapezoidal area coverage on a per-pixel basis for the highest-quality antialiasing possible (effectively 256xAA).
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Fast CPU setup, making full use of parallelism. Pathfinder 3 uses the Rayon library to quickly perform a CPU tiling prepass to prepare vector scenes for the GPU. This prepass can be pipelined with the GPU to hide its latency.
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Fast GPU rendering, even at small pixel sizes. Even on lower-end GPUs, Pathfinder typically matches or exceeds the performance of the best CPU rasterizers. The difference is particularly pronounced at large sizes, where Pathfinder regularly achieves multi-factor speedups.
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GPU compute-based rendering, where available. Pathfinder can optionally use compute shaders to achieve better performance than what the built-in GPU rasterization hardware can provide. Compute shader capability is not required, and all features are available without it.
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Advanced font rendering. Pathfinder can render fonts with slight hinting and can perform subpixel antialiasing on LCD screens. It can do stem darkening/font dilation like macOS and FreeType in order to make text easier to read at small sizes. The library also has support for gamma correction.
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Support for SVG. Pathfinder 3 is designed to efficiently handle workloads that consist of many overlapping vector paths, such as those commonly found in SVG and PDF files. It can perform occlusion culling, which often results in dramatic performance wins over typical software renderers that use the painter's algorithm. A simple loader that leverages the
resvglibrary to render a subset of SVG is included, so it's easy to get started. -
3D capability. Pathfinder can render fonts and vector paths in 3D environments without any loss in quality. This is intended to be useful for vector-graphics-based user interfaces in VR, for example.
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Lightweight. Unlike large vector graphics packages that mix and match many different algorithms, Pathfinder 3 uses a single, simple technique. It consists of a set of modular crates, so applications can pick and choose only the components that are necessary to minimize dependencies.
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Portability to most GPUs manufactured in the last decade, including integrated and mobile GPUs. Geometry, tessellation, and compute shader functionality is not required.
Pathfinder 3 is a set of modular packages, allowing you to choose which parts of the library you need. An SVG rendering demo, written in Rust, is included, so you can try Pathfinder out right away. It also provides an example of how to use the library. (Note that, like the rest of Pathfinder, the demo is under heavy development and has known bugs.)
Running the demo is as simple as:
$ cd demo/native
$ cargo run --release
Running examples (e.g. canvas_nanovg) can be done with:
$ cd examples/canvas_nanovg
$ cargo run --release
Pathfinder libraries are available on crates.io with the pathfinder_ prefix (e.g.
pathfinder_canvas), but you may wish to use the master branch for the latest features and bug
fixes.
There's a Matrix chat room available at
#pathfinder:mozilla.org.
If you're on the Mozilla Matrix server, you can search for Pathfinder to find it. For more
information on connecting to the Matrix network, see
this wiki.mozilla.org page.
The entire Pathfinder community, including the chat room and GitHub project, is expected to abide by the same Code of Conduct that the Rust project itself follows.
The primary author is Patrick Walton (@pcwalton), with contributions from the Servo development community.
The logo was designed by Jay Vining.
Pathfinder is licensed under the same terms as Rust itself. See LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT.
Material Design icons are copyright Google Inc. and licensed under the Apache 2.0 license.