For an overview about Utilities, see PEXlib Utilities.
The Utilities for Computing Shape Hints include:
These utilities compute a shape hint for the fill area and quadrilateral mesh PEX output primitives. These utilities are intended for you to use to determine a shape hint for your data, if not already known, and then pass the hint to the implementation. Many implementations use the shape hint to optimize the rendering of these primitives, making it worthwhile to provide an accurate shape hint.