Computer Science ETDs

Publication Date

7-1-2013

Abstract

The glyphs described in a font are usually rendered using software that runs on the CPU. This can be done very quickly and is a well understood process. These techniques work well when the glyph is rendered such that each point on the rendered glyph maps one-to-one to pixels on the screen. When this one-to-one mapping is removed, visual quality can degrade dramatically. This thesis describes a method to avoid this degradation by moving the rendering of glyphs from the CPU to the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). This method extracts glyph metrics from Truetype font files using the FreeType library, processes all glyph data in the font file and places it into a form that can be used by GPU shader programs to draw the glyphs such that the visual quality does not degrade regardless of the applied transformations.

Language

English

Keywords

GPU, graphics, typography

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Computer Science

Level of Degree

Masters

Department Name

Department of Computer Science

First Committee Member (Chair)

Kniss, Joe

Second Committee Member

Luger, George

Third Committee Member

Angel, Ed

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