Rasterin

Rasterin is a hypothetical rasterization framework described in computer graphics discourse as a proposed standard for converting vector graphics into raster images. It is not an officially adopted standard, and there is no production-ready, widely used implementation. The term is commonly used to illustrate rendering pipeline concepts rather than to reference a current technology.

The design of Rasterin centers on a tile-based rendering engine that processes vector primitives—such as lines, curves, and polygons—into pixel data. A path evaluator computes per-primitive coverage, which is then rasterized into per-tile maps. The pipeline emphasizes deterministic output, support for multiple color spaces, and high-quality anti-aliasing achieved through multi-pass compositing and careful coverage management. The architecture is intended to be hardware-agnostic, enabling experimentation on both software-only and accelerated platforms.

In its notional data model, Rasterin defines a Rasterin Image Format (RIF) that stores tile-based pixel data, per-tile coverage information, color metadata, and optional compression. A separate vector-geometry stream and a caching layer are described to optimize rendering of large scenes and to facilitate streaming of complex vector content.

Implementations of Rasterin exist primarily in educational tools and toy simulators used to demonstrate tiling, caching, and pipeline stages. The framework is often used in hypothetical benchmarks and diagrams comparing rendering approaches with established methods such as scanline rasterization and ray tracing.

History and status: Rasterin originated in late-2010s academic discussions as a conceptual framework for rendering pipelines. It has not progressed into formal standardization or broad adoption.

See also: Rasterization, Vector graphics, Anti-aliasing, Tiling.