The outlines of a run's character stroke are kept with the glyph geometry the renderer keeps for the type, in a byte-limited cache swept by frame, so type that changes in every frame (an animation) frees them within a few frames.
To check what it kept for a live object, or for effect art made from
live objects, type or symbols, the renderer walked the object in every
frame to hash the symbols, patterns and placed files it shows, and it
looked up each symbol instance it found by name in the list of every
symbol. At 1000 x 1000 pixels, the walk took most of the frame on a
page of 2,000 envelopes around instances of the last 2,000 of 10,000
symbols: 83 ms a frame when every frame walked them.
The renderer now keeps what the walk found with the node, which it
holds weakly, and with the document's symbols and patterns as the walk
read them. A later frame makes the key from what was kept while the
node and the document's symbols and patterns stay the same, and walks
the node again when any of them changes. A walk that finds a placed
file is not kept. An evaluation that the live cache does not keep, such
as a thumbnail's copy, is no longer walked. The same page now takes
30 ms a frame, with the same pixels.
Docs: docs/target-app-parity.md
Illustrator 30.0's gradient Dither, from the public documentation
(https://helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/desktop/paint-and-fill/create-and-edit-gradients/control-dither-in-gradients.html):
a Dither checkbox in the Gradient panel; dither converts the gradient into
pixels with subtle noise, works with gradient fills only, and follows the
Document Raster Effects resolution.
- Gradient gains `dither` (serde default false, written only when on, so
older files open unchanged and new files keep it).
- The renderer draws a dithered linear or radial fill as an image paint: the
gradient sampled a cell per device pixel or finer (quarter-octave steps,
cached per thread), each channel given seeded triangular noise of up to a
level before rounding. Same pixels every run; strokes and undithered fills
draw exactly as before. PNG and other raster exports go through it.
- SVG and PDF write a dithered fill as an image at the document's raster
effects resolution, clipped to the shape (the freeform-gradient path);
characters' fills stay vector gradients in SVG, with a warning.
- paint.editGradient and paint.setFill take `dither`; strokes refuse it.
The Gradient panel's Dither box is dimmed behind the Stroke proxy.
- i18n rows in all 24 catalogs; docs: G13, target-app-parity, ui-parity,
mcp.md, plugins.md.
The renderer kept the shapes it drew for plug-in effects while the
object stayed the same. When a plug-in was installed for the first
time, installed again or removed, a renderer that had drawn the object
went on drawing the shapes from before the change.
When the plug-in registry's revision changes, the renderer now drops
the effect geometry and the effect art of objects with a plug-in
effect, and the cull bounds of every object that is or holds a symbol
instance or an object with a plug-in effect. Each thread then drops the
pattern tiles whose art has a plug-in effect or shows symbols or
patterns. The renderer adds the revision to the inputs of a raster
when its content has a plug-in effect, or shows symbols or patterns
while the document's symbol or pattern art has one, and to the key of
a live object's evaluation when the object, or an object it shows, has
a plug-in effect.
With other builds running, a temporary release test timed that key for
the 400 live objects in each of three documents at 11 to 609
microseconds a frame, against 9 to 433 before.
Docs: docs/target-app-parity.md, docs/gaps.md.
The renderer drew each symbol instance by copying its symbol's art,
staining the copy for a stained instance and moving every object in it
by the instance's transform, in every frame. The copies were new
nodes, so the caches the renderer keys by a node's address (cull
bounds, path geometry, glyph layouts, live-effect geometry) missed for
every object of every instance, and the copies stayed in those caches
until they were pruned. Stroke outlines missed as well, because their
cache uses an entry only when the entry holds the node being drawn.
The renderer copied and moved the art of inline graphics in type the
same way.
The renderer now keeps the art it places in a frame cache with a
64 MiB budget, under the address of the symbol's art, the transform,
whether strokes scale with it, and the instance's stain. When the art
is a group or a layer without an appearance of its own, the renderer
copies none of it in a frame whose instances and symbols did not
change, and the objects in it hit the caches keyed by their own
address (cull bounds and paths, glyph layouts, live-effect geometry).
The stroke-outline cache keys a stroke by its address in the
appearance. In the art placed for an unstained instance, each object
without a gradient fill or stroke shares its appearance with the same
object in the symbol's art. When a symbol has two or more unstained
instances, the renderer therefore still outlines the strokes of those
objects again for each instance in every frame. Moving or restaining
an instance, or editing its symbol's art, places that art again, and
the other instances keep theirs. Other art is placed again in every
frame, as before, and so is art that holds a symbol instance, type
with an inline graphic, an image, a placed document, a blend, an
envelope, a repeat or a raster effect. Art that holds type is placed
again when the fonts change.
vectorcraft-cli bench of a symbol of eight paths (three filled and
stroked, two only filled, three only stroked) shown by 2,000
unstained instances took 51.6 ms a frame on main and 32.3 ms with
this change, at 2880x1800 on 8 threads; the same paths in 2,000
groups took 26.0 ms. The peak working set of a bench run at that size
went from 150 MiB to 83 MiB. In the tests, a renderer that keeps
placed art draws the same pixels as a new renderer, and instances
draw the same pixels as groups of their placed art.
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
Jürg Lehni