skia2/site/user/tips.md

Tips & FAQ

• Gyp Options
• Bitmap Subsetting
• Capture a .skp file on a web page in Chromium
• How to add hardware acceleration in Skia
• Does Skia support Font hinting?
• Does Skia shape text (kerning)?

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Gyp Options

When running sync-and-gyp, the GYP_DEFINES environment variable can be used to change Skia’s compile-time settings, using a space-separated list of key=value pairs. For example, to disable both the Skia GPU backend and PDF backends, run it as follows:

GYP_DEFINES='skia_gpu=0 skia_pdf=0' python bin/sync-and-gyp
ninja -C out/Debug

Note: Setting enviroment variables in the Windows CMD.EXE shell uses a different syntax.

You can also set environment variables such as CC, CXX, CFLAGS, CXXFLAGS, or CPPFLAGS to control how Skia is compiled. To build with clang, for example:

CC='clang' CXX='clang++' python bin/sync-and-gyp
ninja -C out/Debug

To build with clang and enable a compiler warning for unused parameters in C++ (but not C or assembly) code:

CXXFLAGS='-Wunused-parameter' \
    CC='clang' CXX='clang++' python bin/sync-and-gyp
ninja -C out/Debug

The GYP_GENERATORS environment variable can be used to set the build systems that you want to use (as a comma-separated list). The default is 'ninja,msvs-ninja' on Windows, 'ninja,xcode' on Mac OS X, and just 'ninja' on Linux. For example, to generate only Ninja files on Mac:

GYP_GENERATORS='ninja' python bin/sync-and-gyp
ninja -C out/Debug

Finally, the SKIA_OUT environment variable can be used to set the path for the build directory. The default is out inside the top-level Skia source directory. For example to test Skia with two different compilers:

CC='clang' CXX='clang++' SKIA_OUT=~/build/skia_clang python bin/sync-and-gyp
CC='gcc'   CXX='g++'     SKIA_OUT=~/build/skia_gcc   python bin/sync-and-gyp
ninja -C ~/build/skia_clang/Debug
ninja -C ~/build/skia_gcc/Debug

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Bitmap Subsetting

Taking a subset of a bitmap is effectively free - no pixels are copied or memory is allocated. This allows Skia to offer an API that typically operates on entire bitmaps; clients who want to operate on a subset of a bitmap can use the following pattern, here being used to magnify a portion of an image with drawBitmapNine():

SkBitmap subset;
bitmap.extractSubset(&subset, rect);
canvas->drawBitmapNine(subset, ...);

An example

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Capture a .skp file on a web page in Chromium

1. Launch Chrome or Chromium with --no-sandbox --enable-gpu-benchmarking
2. Open the JS console (ctrl-shift-J)
3. Execute: chrome.gpuBenchmarking.printToSkPicture('/tmp') This returns "undefined" on success.

Open the resulting file in the Skia Debugger, rasterize it with dm, or use Skia's SampleApp to view it:

bin/sync-and-gyp
ninja -C out/Release debugger dm SampleApp
out/Release/debugger /tmp/layer_0.skp &

out/Release/dm --src skp --skps /tmp/layer_0.skp -w /tmp \
    --config 8888 gpu pdf --verbose
ls -l /tmp/*/skp/layer_0.skp.*

out/Release/SampleApp --picture /tmp/layer_0.skp

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How to add hardware acceleration in Skia

There are two ways Skia takes advantage of specific hardware.

1. Subclass SkCanvas

   Since all drawing calls go through SkCanvas, those calls can be redirected to a different graphics API. SkGLCanvas has been written to direct its drawing calls to OpenGL. See src/gl/

2. Custom bottleneck routines

   There are sets of bottleneck routines inside the blits of Skia that can be replace on a platform in order to take advantage of specific CPU features. One such example is the NEON SIMD instructions on ARM v7 devices. See src/opts/

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Does Skia support Font hinting?

Skia has a built-in font cache, but it does not know how to actual render font files like TrueType into its cache. For that it relies on the platform to supply an instance of SkScalerContext. This is Skia's abstract interface for communicating with a font scaler engine. In src/ports you can see support files for FreeType, Mac OS X, and Windows GDI font engines. Other font engines can easily be supported in a like manner.

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Does Skia shape text (kerning)?

No. Skia provides interfaces to draw glyphs, but does not implement a text shaper. Skia's client's often use HarfBuzz to generate the glyphs and their positions, including kerning.