Each patch of a gradient mesh was cut into 8 x 8 flat quads for SVG export,
Object > Expand and the other outputs that cannot shade a mesh, whatever its
colours, so a patch of one colour became 64 identical pieces. Neighbouring
quads are now joined into square blocks wherever the colour changes by no
more than about one 8-bit step across the block; the block's outline runs
through its quads' corners, and a patch that folds over itself is not joined.
A mesh read from a file can have any number of patches, and the view any zoom: a 150 x 150 mesh from a 3 MB file exported at 20x asked for about 23 million quads (2 GB), and the command's own cap of 50 rows and columns does not apply to a loaded one. One tessellation now makes at most 1,048,576 quads, the subdivision per patch giving way before that, and a mesh with more patches than that is malformed, like a point count that does not fit.
Create Gradient Mesh's To Center / To Edge highlight lightened every point
towards RGB white, so a CMYK (or grey) point became display RGB. A patch with
any non-CMYK corner then mixes in RGB, and the PDF writer separated those
colours back to CMYK with K = 0, moving ink off the K plate. Points now
lighten towards white in their own colour model (no ink for CMYK), so the
mesh stays CMYK and K shrinks with the other inks. Flat meshes (highlight 0)
already kept their inks.
Envelope Options stored Anti-Alias and Preserve Shape Using, but nothing that
draws an image read them: a distorted image was always smoothed and always
cut into clip groups.
- With Anti-Alias off, each piece of a distorted image is marked pixelated
(saved as `pixelated`). The renderer draws it with nearest-neighbor
sampling and without mips, SVG export writes `image-rendering: pixelated`,
and PDF export writes it without /Interpolate.
- With Preserve Shape Using Transparency, each piece is the image with a
white opacity mask in the piece's shape instead of a clip group. The
renderer paints an image whose mask is one plain white path straight into
that path, as it does for an image in a clip group, when the path lies
inside the image's frame.
Docs: docs/mcp.md, docs/target-app-parity.md.
bflatastic