Drawing a variable width line in openGL (No glLineWidth)

opengl

Solution

Assume your original points are (x1,y1) -> (x2,y2). Use the following points (x1-width/2, y1), (x1+width/2,y1), (x2-width/2, y2), (x2+width/2,y2) to construct a rectangle and then use quads/tris to draw it. This the simple naive way. Note that for large line widths you'll get weird endpoint behavior. What you really want to do then is some smart parallel line calculations (which shouldn't be that bad) using vector math. For some reason dot/cross product and vector projection come to mind.

Problem

What is the best way to draw a variable width line without using glLineWidth? Just draw a rectangle? Various parallel lines? None of the above?

Original source

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