HQ vs. VHQ rendering

[BobInce]

New super-high quality vector and photo rendering

Hmm. I can see (and greatly appreciate) how this affects scaled-down bitmaps, but does this actually affect vector rendering in any way? I don't see any obvious effect.

It's not super-sampling, much though I'd love this feature in a future version (especially useful for export).

[Xhris]

Hmm. I can see (and greatly appreciate) how this affects scaled-down bitmaps, but does this actually affect vector rendering in any way? I don't see any obvious effect.

It's not super-sampling, much though I'd love this feature in a future version (especially useful for export).

If you look at the edge of a vector, you can see it's drawn with more horizontal anti-aliasing steps in VHQ mode than HQ mode. I didn't notice this at first until it was pointed out to me. It wasn't documented either.

(top pic is HQ, bottom is VHQ)

[BobInce]

If you look at the edge of a vector, you can see it's drawn with more horizontal anti-aliasing steps in VHQ mode

Aha! Yes, I can easily see it now I know what I'm looking for. Thanks! It's not considerably slower on my machine than HQ, so I think I'll leave that on all the time.

One oddness I've noticed with lines like the one you posted, in both HQ and VHQ mode, is that it the pixel values don't change monotonically - that is, there isn't a straight-line gradient from dark to light on the anti-aliased pixels of a near-rectilinear line. In the close up above, you can see pixels where it goes darker, then lighter, then darker again, which is not the ideally-smooth behaviour one might expect.

Why does this happen? Is Xara doing something funny, like sampling semi-randomly-positioned points or something?

[RTK]

Bump because if split threads.

Risto