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Comment by AndyKelley | Hacker News Reader

Drawing text is hard, and not something that should be solved at the OpenGL level. It involves coordinating with the window manager and user settings.

But I'm just responding to the gimmicky title. It looks like the article has some interesting technical content to it.

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> Drawing text is hard, and not something that should be solved at the OpenGL level.

Agree completely with the first part, less sure about the second. Almost everything needs to do it. Text rendering was included in OpenVG, which seems to have flopped completely. And rendering anything to the screen with OpenGL will involve coordinating with the window manager.

Mark Kilgard's gigantic NV_path_rendering extension included a LOT of font/glyph support. It surprised me as well when I first read it, but there's some interesting discussion of the rationale in the second item of the Issues list at the end of the spec [1].

[1] https://www.opengl.org/registry/specs/NV/path_rendering.txt

For certain applications, it makes sense to solve it outside of OpenGL. For other applications [1][2], it makes more sense to utilize the GPU directly.

[1] - http://mattdesl.github.io/npm-names/

[2] - http://mattdesl.svbtle.com/material-design-on-the-gpu

I agree for the most part. For a lot of cases we did use tooltips, overlays, and sidebars. That isn't a cure all though. Without embedding text we couldn't really give enough context to the end user.

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