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Comment by dcrazy | Hacker News Reader

The Slug library [1] is a commercial middleware that implements such a GPU glyph rasterizer.

They describe a fair amount of their algorithm directly on their website. Do they have patents for it? It would be fun to make an open source wgpu version, maybe using some stuff from cosmic-text for font parsing and layout. But if at the end of that I'd get sued by Slug, that would be no fun.

Slug is patented but there are other similar approaches being worked on (e.g., vello https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44236423 that uses wgpu).

I also created glyphon (https://github.com/grovesNL/glyphon) which renders 2D text using wgpu and cosmic-text. It uses a dynamic glyph texture atlas, which works fine in practice for most 2D use cases (I use it in production).

I did something similar with cosmic-text and glium, but it would be fun to have a vector rendering mode to do fancier stuff with glyph outlines and transforms for games and 3D stuff. And open source, of course.

I suppose vello is heading there but whenever I tried it the examples always broke in some way.

I have an abandoned proof-of-concept of something similar that might be worth checking out https://github.com/mxple/fim

Very interesting! I think I would get motion sickness judging by what I saw in the video, but I see what you're getting at with bezier rendering.

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