Why focused on mobile platforms?

[Robert Conde]

In the presentation, Behdad says he doesn't see the applications for desktop. Can anyone explain this? I have the need for the high quality text rendering that Glyphy provides in a desktop application.

[Behdad Esfahbod]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 8:16 AM, Robert Conde <jah...@gmail.com> wrote:

In the presentation, Behdad says he doesn't see the applications for desktop. Can anyone explain this? I have the need for the high quality text rendering that Glyphy provides in a desktop application.

Hi Robert,

Sorry for not replying earlier.  What I was trying to say is that:

  1. It's hard to plug GLyphy-style rasterization in existing Linux desktops.  That's mostly because the existing layering (X server, XRender, cairo, etc) get in the way, not an inherent problem if someone's designing a new platform, say, on top of Wayland.

  2. It's hard to ship something like GLyphy on the desktop as desktop GPUs vary quite a lot and most drivers are buggy.

On the mobile, specifically, Android, there are the following benefits:

  1. Android platform is one piece that fully controls how text gets to the screen and already has a GPU-accelerated text rendering path.  Plugging in GLyphy would be very easy.

  2. GLyphy can be tested on any hardware profile and tuned for it long before it ships.

That's what I meant.  Hope it's a bit more clear now.  It's perfectly possible for a desktop app to use something like GLyphy.  It just may not work on a wide variety of desktops with old or buggy drivers.

behdad