D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer

A portable and lightning-fast rasterizer for smooth anti-aliased vector graphics of stunning output quality.

Download Purchase

D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer represents the foundation of D-Type scalable rendering technology. This powerful and portable C/C++ library can quickly, easily and reliably convert arbitrary vector shapes (outlines) to high-quality anti-aliased bitmaps, while supporting any output size, resolution, device and CPU architecture. D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer has been extensively optimized for speed and, by default, makes no use of floating-point math. For the highest level of performance, D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer can utilize multiple worker threads to render concurrently. All these unique features, combined with many other state-of-the-art algorithms and advanced code, make D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer the world’s fastest software rasterizer.

D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer allows developers to easily construct and render shapes of any type, size or complexity. Two complementary methods are available:

• To easily draw common 2D primitives such as lines, Bézier and B-spline curves, arcs, circles, ellipses, rectangles and polygons, developers can utilize a helper library of common 2D primitives. These primitives can be drawn solid or dashed with a custom thickness, while their ends can be flat, rounded (inside or outside), or marked with special symbols (dots, arrows etc). An affine transformation matrix can be applied to any 2D primitive, allowing the final shape to be stretched, skewed, and/or rotated.

• To draw completely arbitrary shapes, developers can define the outline using straight and/or curved segments and pass it to D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer for direct rendering. It’s super fast and easy.

Regardless of the shape construction method, D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer produces identical output, down to the pixel, on any platform your application targets — Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android or perhaps your own custom embedded system. As with all other D-Type rendering engines, developers can draw to their own device independent memory surfaces, which include a variety of formats such as 8-bpp grayscale, 16-bpp, 24-bpp RGB and various 32-bpp RGBA formats. Additionally, applications can optionally apply various styles (color, transparency, shadows, blurring, embossing effects, patterns etc.) as the final step of the rasterization process.

D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer is known for its small footprint, unmatched speed, advanced architecture, and crisp, smooth, high-quality output. It is no surprise that both D-Type Font Engine and D-Type PowerDoc Engine internally rely on D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer to render fonts and complex scalable 2D shapes.

Features

• Outstanding rendering quality
• Ultra-fast rendering — can utilize multiple worker threads to render concurrently
• Always sharp and smooth edges
• Extremely simple set of instructions
• Transparent shapes, with adjustable transparency
• Special effects such as Gaussian and Fuzzy Blur, Emboss, Shade, Pattern Fill etc. NEW
• A helper library of common 2D primitives
• Coordinates can be specified as whole pixels, float or fixed (fractional) values
• Supports both the Odd-Even and Nonzero Winding Number rules
• Renders extremely large shapes without difficulties
• Excellent dropout prevention
• Low hardware requirements
• Highly configurable

Key Specifications

Examples

Goodbye Pixels!

Although both illustrations represent two identical groups of objects rendered at the same resolution, the difference in quality is obvious. Compared to ordinary black-and-white rasterizers, D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer significantly increases the number of addressable points on the screen. The result is absolutely superior quality and consistently smooth edges.

Dropout Prevention

Thin lines and skinny polygons can be very difficult to render properly at low resolutions. However, with D-Type’s dropout prevention, you always get the best possible results (FIG-2A). In contrast, see the same object rendered by an ordinary rasterizer that lacks support for dropout prevention (FIG-2B).

Grayscale

Certain rasterizers can only render using a limited number of gray levels. For example, Adobe Photoshop uses only 16 levels. Compare that with D-Type’s 256 gray levels. The difference in quality is quite obvious, especially when rendering small text and other objects with fine detail.

Screenshots

Here are a few examples that show D-Type Grayscale Rasterizer in action.