AA_Zones to RGB?

Why do you need this? If for use in filters, then I wouldn't recommend that. AAZones are a purely internal feature, its implementation may vary from version to version and from patch to patch, so there's no guaranteed consistency to its output.

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compute their bounding boxes and centers.

That's where the main difficulty lies.

To discover the contour of an implicitly defined shape (implicitly means "defined as a function, not as a polygon or bitmap") you have to sample it, starting from point within the shape and gradually moving outwards, towards the shape edges.

Imagine trying to dicover the contour of a complex shape painted on a graph paper, while blindfolded. You have a pencil that you can poke the shape with, and a friend that tells you whether you hit the shape with your last poke or not, and if you did hit it, he also tells you the hit coordinates (that's the reason why we're using graph paper). You can then use these coordinates to build a contour, a map, a bounding box or whatever other kind of model you're constructing.

Imagine how many pokes you would need in order to discover a complex shape, for example a chinese hieroglyph, with sufficient precision.

And that's just the first step, sampling. Next you will need to store the discovered contour in memory so that you don't have to rediscover it every time you receive a get_sample() call.

To recap, a quality implementation of this is far from trivial.

Ok, so my guess is: 'AA_zones -> RGB' is impossible (i.e. not implemented), because it wasn't intended to be used in scripts at all.

I understand that we can't even begin to tackle region-based gradients in an efficient manner without a working Bitmap Script component that delivers a 'bitmap signal' of the AA_zone data that is defined implicitly by the preceding filter tree.

So I'm going to rephrase my initial question:

Assuming we had a Bitmap Script component in FF, would it make sense to make this AA_zone 'region-ID' data accessible to bitmap scripts? After all, isn't this data basically available/delivered 'for free'?

Well, that concludes our speculation time for today then.

Betis, it does look cool, but we can't guarantee that it will look the same way between different versions of components, rendering engine etc. See my replies on this above.