A 1.5th order approximation to a 1st draft

[ipdf/sam.git] / meta / Abstract.tex

diff --git a/meta/Abstract.tex b/meta/Abstract.tex
index e69de29..4c1d5fd 100644 (file)
--- a/meta/Abstract.tex
+++ b/meta/Abstract.tex
@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+\section*{Abstract}
+
+Early document formats such as PostScript were motivated by a desire to
+print text and visual information onto a static paper medium.
+Although documents are increasingly viewed digitally, modern standards
+including PDF and SVG are still largely based upon this model.
+Digital document viewers are able to scale a subregion of the document to
+fit the display. However, coordinates of graphics primitives are
+typically represented with IEEE-754 floating point numbers. This places
+limits on the precision with which primitives in the document can be
+specified and rendered.
+
+We have implemented a minimal SVG viewer, with which we have
+compared a number of approaches to achieving arbitrary precision
+document formats. We demonstrate the trade off between performance and
+precision with alternative number representations including arbitrary
+precision floats, rationals, and IEEE-754 fixed precision floats. We also
+consider approaches to increasing the precision that can be attained with
+IEEE-754 floats.
+
+{\bf Keywords:} \emph{document formats, precision, floating point, vector images, graphics, OpenGL, SDL2, PostScript, PDF, {\TeX}, SVG, HTML5, Javascript }
+
+{\bf Note:} This report is best viewed digitally as a PDF. The digital version is available at \url{http://szmoore.net/ipdf/sam/thesis.pdf}
+
+% Oh dear...
+\quad \\ \quad \\ \quad \\ \quad