It is of some historical significance that vector display devices were popular during the 70s and 80s, and papers oriented towards drawing on these devices can be found\cite{brassel1979analgorithm}. Whilst curves can be drawn at high resolution on vector displays, a major disadvantage was shading\cite{lane1983analgorithm}; by the early 90s the vast majority of computer displays were raster based\cite{computergraphics2}.


Hearn and Baker's textbook ``Computer Graphics''\cite{computergraphics2} gives a comprehensive overview of graphics from physical display technologies through fundamental drawing algorithms to popular graphics APIs. This section will examine algorithms for drawing two dimensional geometric primitives on raster displays as discussed in ``Computer Graphics'' and the relevant literature. This section is by no means a comprehensive survey of the literature but intends to provide some idea of the computations which are required to render a document.

 We will restrict our focus to drawing the outlines of shapes, as the accuracy of shading a region will depend on the accuracy of the outline.
