The brush cache dropped brush art that can show a symbol or a pattern
only when the art of the document's symbols or patterns changed. Renaming
one, for example swapping the names of two symbols, left their art as it
was, so a brush whose art holds an instance of one of those names kept
drawing the old symbol. The cache now compares the names along with the
art.
Brush art leaves out the symbol instances and pattern paints whose art
draws a brushed stroke. The brush cache now records whether a brush's art
or the stroke's paint can show a symbol or a pattern, and drops those
entries when the art of the document's symbols or patterns changes, so an
edit that makes a symbol or pattern start or stop drawing a brushed stroke
draws as a new renderer does.
The parity line gives the median and fastest-frame figures of the
benchmark for both documents it names.
The renderer kept brush art per node id and stroke. The copies drawn
for symbol instances, inline graphics and repeat copies share their
art's ids, so they replaced each other's brush art and it was made
again in every frame. The pieces were drawn as plain nodes, so brush
art that is a live object, such as an envelope that a scatter brush
places, was evaluated again in every frame, for a path on the page too.
The brush cache now also keys brush art by the stroked path, so each
copy keeps its own. Kept pieces are drawn through the renderer's
caches: their stroke outlines, live-effect geometry and live object
evaluations are kept between frames. Each frame draws what a new
renderer draws. On one thread at 1000 x 1000 pixels, 2,000 paths on
the page whose scatter brush art is an envelope took 400 ms a frame on
main and take 94 ms, and the fastest frames of 2,000 instances of a
symbol whose art is a brushed path went from 16 ms to 12 ms, with the
same pixels.
Docs: docs/target-app-parity.md
Review follow-up (CodeRabbit): leaving a dashed brush stroke out of the
paint count still let a fill plus that stroke count as one paint, so the
fill and each brush piece took the object opacity separately and the fill
showed through the brush art. A visible dashed brush stroke now forces the
layered path, like a non-solid paint does, and counts normally otherwise.
brush_fx::tests::object_opacity_fades_a_brushed_stroke_once compares a
brushed rectangle at object opacity 0.5 with the same rectangle in a group
at 0.5, with and without a dash and a fill; before the change the fill
plus dashed brush case had 1440 differing pixels.
A scatter brush whose art is an instance of a symbol stroked with that brush, or any brush whose
art is painted with a pattern whose tile is stroked with it, drew itself without end: a stack
overflow in a hand-written native file. Brush pieces already strip the brushes of their own
strokes; now what they draw by name that would draw a brushed stroke (a symbol instance, or a
pattern paint, also through the symbols and patterns those use) is left out too, in one place
(`stroke_pieces`, which every renderer and exporter calls with the document).
Probed the rest of item 2 of the depth follow-up with hand-written hostile inputs, kept as tests:
graph designs of deep art and of a symbol holding itself, Affinity groups nested to and past
both of its reader's caps, DXF blocks inserting themselves, EMF/WMF saving states without end,
and plug-in manifests and output nested 30,000 to 100,000 deep. None of them overflowed.
Every symbol instance was measured as its transform applied to the
20 × 20 square around the origin, which symbols made in the app keep
their art in. The SVG and DXF importers keep symbol art as drawn, so
the box of an instance of an imported symbol did not match its art.
The SVG Star instance at x 20, y 30 draws from (20, 30) to (40, 50)
and was measured from (10, 20) to (30, 40). Align moved such an
instance by the wrong amount, clicks and marquees beside its art
selected it, and the canvas, exports and prints left it out when its
art reached the view or the page and the square did not.
An instance is now measured by its symbol's art, which
Document::symbol_boxes looks up in the document each time
(Node::geometric_bounds_with, visual_bounds_with and
reach_bounds_with). With Use Preview Bounds on, the strokes in the art
count at their own weight, as the canvas draws them, and
object.setBounds counts them at that weight when it sizes an instance
or an object that holds one. When strokes do not scale and a width or
height of 0 or more is smaller than what a path's stroke adds,
object.setBounds now gives the path no width or height, as it does
for an instance whose art has strokes; before, it mirrored the path.
With Use Preview Bounds on, object.setBounds now measures the margins
that strokes add object by object, the members of groups and the
objects in symbol instances' art included, and solves for the width,
height and reference point asked for when the width and height are 0
or more. Before, it measured the margins of the whole selection and
could miss the size or the reference point asked for when strokes did
not scale and the objects' strokes added different margins, and when
strokes scaled and the width and height were out of proportion, even
for one path. A clip group, a Shaper Group, a compound path, type, and
a group or instance with effects or an opacity mask of its own are each
measured as one object, and so is an instance in perspective or one
turned or slanted relative to the bounding box, other than by quarter
turns. When the selection holds more than 4,096 objects to measure this
way, each selected object is measured as one. Instances inside symbol
art are measured by their own symbol's art. An instance is measured as
the square when its symbol is missing, when its symbol or a symbol
nested in its art holds an instance of itself, and when symbols nest 32
deep in its art.
Align and Distribute, the Transform panel, the bounding box and the
selection outline, clicks, the marquee, document.inspect and
document.node, Fit to Artwork Bounds and Fit to Selected Art, canvas
culling, thumbnails, the SVG filter region of an instance with a
raster effect, raster effect images, Export Selection, the SVG of an
artboard, printing, and the PDF, EPS, EMF/WMF and DXF writers use the
new box. The renderer also culls an instance by the effects and
brushed strokes in its art, and it culls a blend, envelope or repeat
by the brush art of what it holds and the effects in the art of the
instances in it. It culls an instance with geometry effects of its own
by the effects in its art after those geometry effects reshape the art.
It measures the effects in a symbol's art once for each symbol and
linear part of the transform that places it. For symbols whose art
holds instances, it measures at most 4,096 placements a frame, and at
most 4,096 more for each pattern tile it rasterizes and each placed
document it draws. Past that, it estimates the reach from the symbol's
reach with no transform, which it measures once. When the drawn
document's symbols change, the renderer drops the cached bounds of the
instances and of the objects that hold them.
The PDF and EPS writers, the SVG of an artboard and Skip Blank
Artboards grow the box of an instance whose art holds brushed strokes
by 16 times the widest stroke (at least 1 pt) of the objects in that
art that have a brushed stroke, plus 8 pt, as the renderer grows the
cull bounds of a brushed path. They keep an instance whose brush art
reaches the page. The SVG of an artboard also keeps an object that
holds an instance when what the canvas paints for it, the effects in
the symbol's art and the instance's own included, reaches the artboard.
Not yet: other commands that measure objects, such as Select › All on
Active Artboard, Transform Each and Convert to Artboards, still measure
an instance by the square.
Docs: docs/mcp.md, docs/target-app-parity.md.
The renderer kept the rasters of an object's drop shadows, outer glows
and filtered content (Gaussian Blur, Feather and the Photoshop-style
filters), and drew them again while the object, the zoom and rotation
and the ink plane stayed the same. The content drawn into a raster also
reads things outside the object: patterns, symbols, brushes, images,
document, layer and color settings, the knockout a group inherits, the
fonts, and the options the frame is drawn with. When one of them
changed, a renderer that had drawn the object went on drawing the
raster it had kept, made from the old values.
Each kept raster now records what its content was drawn from: which of
those things the object reads, found by walking the object when the
raster is made, and a hash of their values then. The renderer draws
the raster only while that hash is the same in the current frame. Once
a frame, the renderer hashes the document's patterns, symbols and
images. It hashes their art and pixels by the addresses of their
shared values, and it keeps weak references to those values while a
raster made with them is kept, so no other value can take one of those
addresses. A filtered raster also records the color channels its
filters split, and under De-Interlace the raster resolution.
A temporary release test timed the inputs of 400 kept rasters at about
10 microseconds a frame.
Text geometry, clips, clip paints, effect art, brushes, live effects, pattern tiles and freeform
grids were capped by entry count and cleared wholesale on overflow, so a document past the cap
(e.g. more than 4,096 type objects) recomputed every entry on every frame. A FrameCache keeps
per-entry byte sizes and last-used frames, drops the least recently used entries of earlier
frames, and sweeps stale ones. Text geometry keeps its glyph outlines once instead of twice.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VmMmc1J8XeNLxhRihWv9cc
Symbol instances export as one <symbol> def per symbol and a <use> per
instance. An instance the def can't stand for exactly (stained by its fill,
or a transform under which the canvas paints differently: scaling with
strokes, effects or live objects, turning with effects or brushes, any move
with pattern paints or unlinked masks) is written as its own art, now
stained like the canvas and with its patterns and unlinked masks left on
the page. Symbols nested in themselves stop at a fixed depth.
New SVG option hiddenLayers keeps hidden layers as display:none groups;
document.save (and Save As / Save a Copy) turns it on unless told
otherwise, exports leave hidden layers out. Import shows display:none
layer groups to usvg and marks them hidden, so they reopen hidden
(groups a <use> refers to stay templates). File Info metadata goes through
one Dublin Core list. The symbol stain helper moves to vectorcraft-brush
so the renderer and the SVG writer share it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
object.flattenTransparency {preset?|options, ids?} splits the targets into groups of overlapping
objects. Groups with transparency become atomic regions (faces of the arrangement of every fill,
outlined stroke and clipping path) filled with the colour the renderer composites there: blend
modes, group opacity, isolated and non-isolated groups, knockout groups and knockout shapes, over
white or (Preserve Alpha) over nothing. Regions reached by gradients, patterns, images, opacity
masks or raster effects are rendered into one image per group, under the regions, clipped to
them with Clip Complex Regions. The raster/vector balance rasterizes whole groups past its region
budget (all at 0). Options and presets live in FlattenOptions; single visible paints keep their
colour and overprint; text and strokes can be outlined everywhere. One undo step.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
On screen, a group (or object) with opacity, a blend mode, an opacity mask or
knockout whose content blends is drawn offscreen over a copy of its backdrop
and mixed back in by its opacity, mask and clip (a group blend mode then
applies to the backdrop-free result, as PDF defines it). Isolate Blending keeps
the content starting from transparency. Clip groups no longer isolate their
children (blending content is clipped per drawing), and non-isolated knockout
groups composite their elements against the art below the group. Groups
without blending inside still render as plain layers.
In PDF, such groups are written as non-isolated transparency groups (a
constant-alpha soft mask instead of the writer's isolated opacity group),
knockout groups included.
doc: Node::blends_through / children_blend.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
dotCooCoo