[MPEG-OTSPEC] the actual skia based ft2-demo ot-svg renderer hook code diff (Re: Success - Re: Skia-based ot-svg renderer hook to freetype)

[Hin-Tak Leung]

Here it is, the actuall code diff for adding skia as a ot-svg renderer hook to freetype, as an alternative to rsvg/cairo. There is a new file "README.skia". I fixed the color change and the intermittent crash, so as far as I know the only thing is that it is occasionally 1-pixel off compared to rsvg/cairo.

This can be somewhat corrected by changing these two lines:

    x = bounds.left();      -> floor(bounds.left());
    y = bounds.top();      -> floor(boulds.left());

I am not convinced that skia is entirey wrong, actually; the equivalent rsvg location has some comments on doubts about rounding.

I thought of switching the hooks dynamically (between 3, rsvg_hook, skia_hook, and a new null_hook), but running init of one hook , switch in the middle and run the free of another hook is dangerous. So this is still done as a build-time change. Otherwise it would be great to switch dynamically to investigate the 1-pixel-difference problem.

For now, if somebody else wants to give this a try, especially a mac user or a windows user, and/or somebody want to build skia (I am lazy and just downloaded a not-too-old pre-built binaries), I like to hear about 1st-hand experience on that too.

The rest, please have a thought how to  switch the hook dynamically, without crashing....

will probably post this up at 
https://github.com/HinTak/harfbuzz-python-demos/ under a new directory "skia-adventure" and write there. Thanks for reading this far :-).









On Wednesday, 12 July 2023 at 07:28:15 BST, Hin-Tak Leung <htl10 at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:


See attached screenshot. Left is skia-based ftview/ftgrid, right is my system-wide ftview/ftgrid 2.13.0 (based on rsvg/cairo). The default zoom level for ftgrid seems to have changed between 2.13.0 and 2.13.1  from 4 to 6?

There are 3 issues I see

- the first one is of course the color - seems to be a rgba vs bgra difference? i.e. the Alpha channel is the same, but red and blue swapped.
- 2nd one is not very noticeable on ftview but more on ftgrid - the glyph is shifted down by one pixel. Probably a rounding error somewhere.
- I have intermitent crashes from 'include/core/SkRefCnt.h:72: fatal error: "assert(this->getRefCnt() > 0)" ' . Prove I don't know Skia well enough yet. ( That's one week of learning Skia ...)

On the way also learns a few things - this is based on m110 . I see that even with main (close to m116), one of the headers I am using have changed location.

I tried updating skia-python 's bundled skia from m87 to m88 - just 1 milestone, or roughly 4 weeks, to get a feel of how easy/hard it is. The main reason is that m88 is the first where the SVGDOM class is declared non-experimental. So I expect the SVG related headers to move. But the actual diff is close to about 1000 lines, took me a whole day. (by comparison, the fontval diff is a little over 4000 lines, and took 3 years). The amount of changes in skia per milestone is just alarming. That explains why nobody wants to ship skia shared libraries, and why skia-python is stuck at m87 for 2 years. Skia is just contantly changing from milestone to milstone.

That said, I think somebody should update skia-python's bundled skia from m87 to m98 (COLRv1) and perhaps even m103 (OT-SVG). Google folks?

One milestone is about 1000 lines of code difference and a whole day,  I reckon it will take somebody working full time for 2 months to update skia-python to current-ish. (116 - 87 = 29 working days..., by the time one gets to m116, m117/m118 would be out...). If google folks are not moving a finger, and somebody else wants to fund me to tackle this, please feel free to get in touch.


I'll tidy the diff up and send it to freetype-devel at some point. At the moment it is just replacing all contents of rsvg-port.{c,h}. with

-#ifdef HAVE_LIBRSVG
+#ifdef HAVE_SKIA
...

-  SVG_RendererHooks  rsvg_hooks = { NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL };
+  SVG_RendererHooks  skia_hooks = { NULL, NULL, NULL, NULL };
...
    (void)FT_Property_Set( handle->library,
-                          "ot-svg", "svg-hooks", &rsvg_hooks );
+                          "ot-svg", "svg-hooks", &skia_hooks );
...

So potentionally I can add a toggle key to dynamically switch between rsvg/cairo to skia rendering by just swapping  &rsvg_hooks with &skia_hooks on the fly.
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