Core Concepts

Paperbit has two distinct parts, the graphics engine and the utilities.

Graphics Engine

PaperbitCanvas

The first thing you will do in a Paperbit project, is to create a PaperbitCanvas object. It is the responsible of creating the canvas. His job is to request frames to the PaperbitAPI. When a frame request is complete, it sends to the gpu all the geometry in a single draw call.

PaperbitAPI

When calling new PaperbitCanvas(...), Paperbit is going to create automatically the a PaperbitAPI linked with the canvas. When using Paperbit the 99% of the time we are going to interact with the PaperbitAPI because it is the responsible of creating the frame data. When the PaperbitCanvas request a frame, PaperbitAPI will fire the needed events (onStart, onDraw, onMouseMove, …) and when all return, it will send back to the PaperbitCanvas all the geometry.

Having this distinction of two classes (canvas and api) let us to create the canvas on the main thread and use the api on a web worker.

Utilities

When using a graphics library, it is always nice to have some common features in our disposal:

• Vector operations
• Matrix operations
• Geometric operations
• Smooth the transition of a number

The main purpose of the utilities is to avoid reinventing the wheel in each project. It is not necessary to use them, but in some circumstances they are be very helpful.