Atrament
- GitHub (1500 stars as of June 2024)
My first open-source software project, Atrament is a library for drawing and handwriting on the HTML canvas. Its goal is for drawing to feel natural and comfortable, and the result to be smooth and pleasing.
I developed the original drawing algorithm for a university project — an infinite public collaborative drawing canvas named 1WALL. It was important for me that users find drawing on the canvas enjoyable, and are satisfied with the results. I realised connecting the mouse positions with simple lines (common in many simple drawing applications) doesn’t produce natural-looking drawings. Real-life pen strokes are continous, while digital mouse movements are composed of discrete position samples.
To address this, I used quadratic curve interpolation, low-pass filtering and adaptive stroke thickness to render natural-looking strokes. I then open-sourced the library as Atrament (meaning "ink" in Slovak). The library has since been used by over 100 software projects on GitHub alone, and received contributions from 12 developers around the world. I maintain Atrament to this day and have published 4 major versions as of 2024.