Where a band border in a gradient or a shaded area runs at a slant, its
pixels form a staircase whose steps are two or more pixels long. When one
piece of outline also runs along a sharp edge in the image, that piece as
a whole is not the contour of a smooth area, and the outline kept a
corner at every step, so the border was traced as a series of right-angle
steps.
subpixel::outline now reads a run of three or more edges of 1 to 8 px,
each turning one way where it starts and the other where it ends, with no
junction on it, as a staircase when the run's own cracks pass
subpixel::low_contrast. A run is cut at any step whose own cracks show half
of the step between the two colors or more. Its edges are steps, as
one-pixel steps already were: no corner where two of them meet, and one
point at the middle of each, moved by the mean of its cracks' shifts. The
corner where a run meets an edge that is not a step stays, so a straight
edge longer than 8 px next to a staircase stays straight. Two one-pixel
steps inside a run are read as part of the slope and do not make a notch.
Longer steps, staircases along a sharp edge and Black and White traces
keep their corners. The runs are the same from either side of the border.
On gradient and photo inputs most traces take fewer anchors. Some rows get
worse: 6 Colors on gradient and photo leaves a gap of 0.9 px (was 1.2) and
an overlap of 1.0 px (was 0.8), High Fidelity Photo with Gradients on a
blurred input takes 50 anchors (was 47), and on a synthetic 800 px photo
the 95th percentile of High Fidelity Photo's pixel difference rises from
6.33 to 6.67 and 16 Colors leaves 2 staircases of 2 px steps or more where
it left none.
Docs: docs/target-app-parity.md, docs/image-trace-quality.md.
object.expand.info reported a gradient (and a fill) to expand for any
type whose characters have a gradient fill. Expand outlines type first,
and each outline then holds the run's gradient on its own box, so a
gradient that repeats or reflects in more than 256 runs across every
outline stays a gradient: the dialog enabled options that changed
nothing.
- The query now measures the paths type.createOutlines makes of the
glyphs, ruby glyphs and underline and strikethrough bars, each with
its run's paint, and reports a gradient when one of them expands. It
lays the text out only when a run has a gradient fill, stops at the
first outline that expands, and does not change the document. Type in
symbol art, blends and repeats goes through the same check.
- docs/mcp.md says when gradient is false; docs/target-app-parity.md
gets an evidence line.
The Gradient panel's Method menu gets two methods of VectorCraft's own
beside Classic and Perceptual. They mix a linear, radial, conic or
diamond gradient's colors around the hue wheel: hue, saturation and
brightness each change evenly from one stop to the next, and the hue
angle keeps one direction, as the fixed-direction rules of
https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/#hue-interpolation do. Hue Clockwise
lowers the angle (red, magenta, blue), which is clockwise on the color
wheels, and Hue Counterclockwise raises it (red, yellow, green).
Two stops whose hues are less than half a color level apart count as
one hue and keep it, so a color and a tint or shade of it do not turn
the whole wheel. A stop whose RGB numbers are less than half a color
level apart is gray and takes the hue of the stop it mixes with, and
black takes that stop's saturation too.
- `paint.editGradient` and `paint.setFill` take `method: hue-clockwise`
or `hue-counterclockwise`, in any case, with a space or an underscore
for the hyphen or without it; other spellings are an error. The native
file writes `HueClockwise` and `HueCounterclockwise`.
- The canvas and raster exports draw the gradient through stops on its
curve, within half a color level.
- Reverse turns the method the other way with the stops, and a Reflect
spread is repeated from the curve's stops, so both keep the colors.
- SVG and PDF write the gradient as an RGB image, CMYK and spot color
stops included, with the spot warning. EPS writes a shading in process
colors with a warning for spot stops. A legacy .ai file and the .ai
editing data get the colors between the stops as stops of their own,
in process colors, at most 256, with a warning. CSS gets those stops
too.
- The `method` error names the four values, in every catalog.
- The Method menu is as wide as its longest name in the interface
language, within the panel.
Docs: docs/mcp.md, docs/plugins.md, docs/target-app-parity.md, ROADMAP.
An app that does not send the image back wrote the window capture to
vectorcraft-window-<pid>.png directly in the system's temporary folder.
On a shared Unix temporary folder another user could put a link at
that name, and the app would then overwrite the file it points to. A
failed read also left the file behind.
The capture now goes to window.png in a new folder made for it inside
the temporary folder (owner-only on Unix; a name that is taken is
skipped). The folder is removed after the read, also when the app or
the read fails.
PDF export without a PDF/X or PDF/A standard writes pages longer than
200 in at full size in points instead of with a UserUnit scale.
longPagesInPoints is now on by default in PdfSettings, the built-in
presets and the Save PDF dialog. Turning it off writes such a page with a
UserUnit from PDF 1.6 on, as before. PDF/A-2b files keep the UserUnit,
and .ai saves keep it unless longPagesInPoints: true is passed.
Docs: params text, docs/mcp.md, docs/target-app-parity.md.
BFlat