Greetings, Looking at the discussion archives, I saw that there have been proposals in the past for exposing anti-aliasing related features to the 2D canvas rendering context. I realize these proposals met significant opposition each time. Nonetheless, I would like to quickly re-open the discussion because I feel there is a lot at stake for the web platform. How about a 2d canvas rendering context attribute for controlling text anti-aliasing, which could be used to enable LCD text filtering?
The main motivation is to make web apps better. For many types of apps, DOM-based rendering is uncompetitively slow (e.g. rendering a large number of independently positioned text labels). On the other hand, 2D canvas can deliver significantly better performance in many cases, but there is a degradation in visual quality due to the lack of LCD text filtering. Current browsers don't enable LCD text in 2D canvas to prevent rendering artifacts. If LCD text were enable-able, authors would have to be mindful of a number of caveats in order to avoid rendering artifacts. For example, artifacts could result from certain use cases of canvas compositing, transforms on the canvas element, canvas-to-canvas copying with drawImage with a transform applied. These are the same caveats native app developers must face when using LCD text filtering. Any thoughts?
