Font rendering on a GPU-based raster image processor

摘要

Historically, in the 35 years of digital printing research, raster image processing has always lagged behind marking engine technology, i.e., we have never been able to deliver rendered digital pages as fast as digital print engines can consume them. This trend has resulted in products based on throttled digital printers or expensive raster image processors (RIP) with hardware acceleration. The current trend in computer software architecture is to leverage graphic processing units (GPU) for computing tasks whenever appropriate. We discuss the issues for rendering fonts on such an architecture and present an implementation.