A grid was the axes rect in device pixels, so dragging a window wide made the
image wider with it -- and the per-frame pass over it is O(cells): the fade
multiplies every cell, a host's ink()/peak() read every cell, and a frame the
fade moved converts and uploads every cell as one byte. At 2x device scale a
1520x850 window's axes rect is 2877 device pixels wide, so four rows of one
trace are 4.5 M cells and 4.9 MB uploaded a frame; measured headless on
llvmpipe with a 2 s window, 12.9 ms of tick and 12.8 ms of draw a frame, every
frame under a time fade -- a cost that follows the window and has no ceiling.
The grid is now the axes rect up to kDensityCellCap (2^18 cells, a mebibyte of
counts), scaled down uniformly past it so cells stay square and the picture
keeps the axes' aspect, and magnified back over the rect with a linear filter:
a cell is a count, so a fragment between two of them is between their two ink
levels, which a point sample cannot give once a cell is several pixels wide.
The same four rows at the cap are 1.05 M cells, 3.9 ms of tick and 5.6 ms of
draw and 1.0 MB uploaded, while a grid under the cap is untouched -- a 640x360
viewport's 573x313 axes is still 179 349 cells, one a device pixel.
The image's footprint is the axes rect rounded up to whole device pixels on
both sides of the pipe, so a grid under the cap keeps the exact
one-texel-a-pixel mapping it has always had (sx/sy come out exactly 1) and only
a capped grid reads its cell index through a scale. Moving the decay itself to
the GPU was considered and left out: the CPU grid is what ink()/peak() read,
what the deposit adds to and what the per-sweep dedupe keys on, so a GPU image
would have to be reconciled with it per frame -- a larger change than this
bound, and not one to half-do.
Tests: a_density_grid_is_capped_whatever_the_window reads the bound off a
3840x2160 viewport (261 504 cells of a 3784x2138 axes, aspect kept),
a_capped_density_is_magnified_over_the_axes_rect reads the screen side of it
(569x460 cells covering all 832 of the rect's columns), and the density cases
now assert their capped figures. 399 cases, 0 failed.
`Plot::set_density()` gives a plot a **phosphor density**: a screen-sized intensity image behind
its traces, into which each acquisition is deposited and which fades by a time constant or by a
per-acquisition factor. It is the library's and not a host's because the library is the side that
knows a trace's device geometry -- a host would be re-rasterising traces the renderer has already
staged, at a second derivation of the same mapping.
It is an **image and not a set of retained traces**, and that is the whole of its cost: one `f32`
cell per device pixel of the axes rect (`DensityGrid`), a cell's value a *number of sweeps*, so a
display of a thousand acquisitions costs what one costs and there is no depth to get wrong.
Measured on a 640x360 viewport's axes: **573x313 = 179 349 cells, 717 396 bytes** of grid, and one
byte per cell uploaded on the frame the grid moved.
- `Plot::accumulate_density()` deposits the acquisition on screen: every visible trace's window is
mapped to sample indices and gathered exactly as `Renderer::draw_traces()` maps it, then walked
column by column -- so the deposit is bounded by the axes' columns and not by the samples behind
them -- and a cell takes **1.0 once per trace per sweep**, however many of that trace's own
samples crossed it. Counting the hits instead put a single dense sweep at the ceiling of the
brightness scale and hid the sweeps behind it, and it made a cell mean "how much the beam moved
here" rather than "how many acquisitions were here"; the dedupe is a stamp per grid *row* (one
`u64`, keyed by trace and column) so two sweeps agreeing on a cell still count twice. Dwell is a
different question the library already answers (`Style::intensity_grading`).
- `decay_density(dt_s)` fades by the clock, `clear_density()` and switching the density off drop
the image at once. `DensityConfig` carries `full_scale` and `gamma`, applied on the CPU when the
grid changed: the value a host reads back through `ink()`/`peak()` and the picture it sees are
one derivation, and a frame whose grid did not move skips the conversion and the upload entirely
(`FrameStats::density_cells`/`density_upload_bytes`, the latter the *frame's* total over every
row, which one row's assignment used to overwrite).
- The renderer draws it as one attribute-less quad over the axes rect (`kDensityVS`/`kDensityFS`,
`DensityProgram`), over the grid and the invalid-span bands and **under the traces**, inside the
axes' clip: it reserves no layout space and nothing on it can be picked, exactly as
`Plot::set_invalid_spans()` does. `Style::density` is its tint.
- The two fades are the two questions a persistence display can be asked -- "still visible a second
later" and "the N-th back is gone" -- so the choice is the caller's.
Six cases, all in the suite: four plot-level ones (the grid's resolution and memory, the
per-acquisition schedule **584 -> 876 -> 1022** ink with `peak_steady=2.000`, `exp(-dt/tau)` off
the ink, and the deposit's own geometry including a NaN as a gap) and one on the real driver
(`a_phosphor_density_is_drawn_under_the_traces`: `cells=179349 uploaded=179349` on the moved frame
and `uploaded=0` on the identical one after it, with the trace's stroke keeping its own colour over
the ink). The suite is **396 cases, 0 failed** and all four ctest entries pass.
Text was point-sampled (`GL_NEAREST` plus `floor(v_uv * u_tex_size)`), which
at a non-integer scale *deletes* texels instead of blending them. The library's
own default -- a 12 px style over the 13 px embedded bake -- dropped one of
every 8 columns and one of every 17 rows of every glyph, so whole strokes went
missing and which ones depended on where the unsnapped pen fell. `kTextFS` now
does a 2x2 bilinear fetch clamped to the instance's own cell: the clamp keeps
the no-bleed guarantee the sampler mode protects (the atlas is a tight strip of
cells with no padding), and at scale 1 with a whole pen the weights are exactly
0, so it stays as crisp as the point sample.
Grid and axis lines were staged in data space and mapped in the vertex shader,
so a 1 px line's centre landed on an arbitrary fraction -- x = 100.0 lights two
columns at half coverage, x = 100.5 lights one crisply, and a frame mixed both.
`u_snap` rounds an axis-aligned segment's ink *leading edge* onto a pixel
boundary, which reduces to integer+0.5 for odd widths and to an integer for
even ones with no case analysis. It is on for the chrome that frames a plot and
off for anything drawn at a data position, since the rounding moves a line by
up to half a pixel. Diagonals are untouched.
`text_pixel`'s threshold drops to 160 because filtered glyphs legitimately peak
at 0.844 coverage at 12/13; the 180 threshold found text only while the sampler
was also deleting a column and a row of it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Breaking: Series::gather emits x relative to x0() and takes a GatherMode;
consumers reconstruct absolute x in f64 before mapping (series.hpp documents
the contract).
Bugs, each pinned by a fail-before regression test:
- render: f32 staging quantised epoch-time x into 128 px columns; every
data-space draw now stages to_space(x) - to_space(origin) with the origin
folded into the offset uniform in f64 (epoch/zero-origin twins rasterise
identically)
- ticks: major test was ULP-fragile and blanked epoch axes; majors are an
integer-index test and are never truncated by the minor cap
- gather: LOD envelope emitted buckets straddling [begin,end); ceil/floor
bucket edges + raw lead/trail spans
- live follow: log x axes held a linear span and zoomed every frame; span and
offset now live in axis space (plot + both figure link-group paths)
- input: a zero-notch wheel disarmed auto_scale on every axis; dy==0 pans x,
factor == 1 / inf refused in wheel and drag zoom
- render: the single text flush painted legend names over the crosshair
readout panel; two batches, under flushed before the panel
- data: NaN dropped from min/max unless it seeded the fold; non-finite
samples are now excluded from every aggregate and from cached bounds
Robustness: viewport normalisation (no clamp UB), non-finite range refusal,
pyramid level cap at 57 (no shift/div UB through public gather), rounded ring
capacity documented + pre-sized, GL blend func and UNPACK_ALIGNMENT
save/restore, Renderer::release_gl() teardown, u64 buffer epochs, annotation
captions clamped, button-aware GLFW row capture, cached figure row rects (no
per-event layout), ruler-pair measurement refused, span-nonfinite guards in
axis_ends.
Features: XY series (sorted x, binary-search neighbours/snap, LOD over sample
index); StreamSeries::freeze(); ArraySeries::push(); per-trace dash and
markers (scatter at width 0) with auto or literal stride; GatherMode
Envelope/Nearest/Mean via bucket_sum/sumsq; Style::line_aa_px; per-glyph text
colour (readout values in trace colour); wheel-dx x pan; arrow-key pan;
Escape cancels a drag and restores captured ranges; modifier-masked box zoom
(Shift both, Ctrl x, Alt y); double-click reset via PointerEvent::time_s;
ImGui key repeat unified; pinch gestures on Qt and GTK; pixelDelta wheel path
and DevicePixelRatioChange handling; GNUInstallDirs, SOVERSION,
SameMinorVersion, generated plot/version.hpp, relocatable plot.pc, licence
install, FILES_MATCHING, GitHub Actions CI (debug/coverage/asan).
Suite 283 -> 350 cases, 0 failed; coverage 93.9% (3730/3971) over 24 files,
floor 80/90 held; ASAN preset suite green; all four demos run headless (the
GTK scripted-resize check needs a window manager and fails identically on the
parent commit); readme_main.cpp committed and compiles with the README
command; pkg-config and find_package consumption verified from a relocated
install prefix.
The repository had no licence at all, so every source was all-rights-reserved
by default. Add the verbatim MIT text at LICENSE (Copyright (c) 2026 Martino
Ferrari) and a two-line SPDX header to each of the 113 first-party sources --
48 include/plot, 26 src, 10 adapters, 5 examples, 21 tests, 3 tools -- so the
grant travels with each file rather than relying on the root document alone.
Scripts keep their shebang on line 1; the SPDX lines follow it. Genuinely
vendored code is untouched: third_party/stb_truetype.h carries no header of
ours. src/render/embedded_mono_font.cpp is generated, so tools/fonts/gen_atlas.py
emit() now writes the two lines into its header comment and the file was
regenerated -- gen_atlas.py --check passes and the regeneration adds only those
comment lines to the previously committed file.
README's provenance section now states MIT and links LICENSE.
No code, test or public API change.
Martino Ferrari