Introduction

A dither engine and dithered UI components for Compose Multiplatform.

Stipple draws dithers. A dither turns a smooth tone into a pattern of ink and paper dots, the way old print and early displays did. In Stipple the pattern comes from a small engine, and anything in Compose can use it: a background, a button, a chart column, a photo, a line of text.

It runs on Android, iOS, JVM desktop and wasmJs from one commonMain source set, and has no Material dependency.

Three ideas carry everything:

• A field says how much ink each point wants. It is a pure function of position and time.
• A pattern is a threshold map. A cell is ink when the field’s tone is above its threshold: Bayer 2, 4 and 8, blue noise, or your own.
• A theme holds the ink and paper colours, an optional palette, and the cell size.

On top of the engine there are modifiers (dither, ditherProgress, ditherImage, ditherFill, ditherMask) and eleven components: DitherButton, DitherBarChart, DitherGrid, DitherGauge, DitherStatCard, DitherProgressBar, DitherText, DitherEffectText, DitherAvatar, DitherImage and DitherBackground. Components are static unless you pass animated = true, and animation stops under reduced motion.

The current version is 1.1.2. See the changelog for what each release changed.

Where to go next

• Getting started installs the library and draws a first dither.
• The guides cover theming, patterns and fields, writing your own dither, choosing a renderer, performance and accessibility.
• Agent skill teaches a coding agent to build with Stipple.
• Prior art says what exists already and how Stipple differs.