The goal of the project was to show how an FPGA could be used to speed up the process of interpreting PDF to produce bitmaps for such applications as printers. Typical spatial resolutions are of the order of 25000 x 40000. Typical operations include the classical Bresenham's line-drawing algorithm for thin and thick lines and the de Casteljau recursive subdivision process for rendering Bézier curves. Implementations of 1-D,2-D separable and non-separable convolution filters with kernels out to 5 x 5 were implemented and all of the foregoing tested on Xilinx Virtex™ FPGAs. The results were reported in the following papers.
1, D. MacVicar, S. Singh, & J. Patterson "Bézier Curve Rendering on Virtex". FCCM'99, IEEE Computer Society 1999
2, 2, D. MacVicar S. Singh, & J. Patterson "Rendering PostScript Fonts on FPGAs".FPL'99. Springer-Verlag 1999.
3, S. Singh, J. Patterson, J. Burns and M. Dale "Postscript Rendering with Virtual Hardware" Proc FPL97 (September 1997) Springer-Verlag 1997.
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