But slug wins in perspective in my eyes.

I use MSDF to render crisp text in my webgl hobby game. Hope to publish it with source code when I get the time.

thanks for sharing the article. I'll take a deeper look at it later.

The project I'm most known for is basically an MSDF shader with a bloom pass. It serves my needs 100%, though if I expand to support arbitrary text, I may reach for Slug.

The one issue with MSDF I want to raise is, it seems everybody uses the same msdfgen texture creation program from Viktor Chlumský's master's thesis 11 years ago. I wish there were other implementations. Who ever heard of a graphics technique that was only ever programmed once, and then used everywhere without substantial iteration? We need to de-XKCD-2347 MSDFs for everyone's sake, including and especially Chlumský.

via WebGPU backend: https://floooh.github.io/sokol-webgpu/slug-sapp.html

via WebGL2 backend: https://floooh.github.io/sokol-html5/slug-sapp.html

There's quite a bit of helper code plus stb_truetype.h and stb_ds.h under the hood to parse TTF files and crunch the TTF curve data into the runtime format expected by the Slug shader (this stuff should better go into an offline asset pipeline tool):

https://github.com/floooh/sokol-samples/blob/master/libs/slu...

...the actual text rendering code is also taking a couple of shortcuts, e.g. no kerning, no right-to-left, and also no text shaping.

There's also a new and complete text rendering stack by Mikko Mononen called Skribidi (AFAIK not based on Slug though):

https://github.com/memononen/Skribidi

...the list of external dependencies is a bit scary for a small self-contained sample though (Harfbuzz, SheenBidi, libunibreak, etc...), but that basically shows that proper international text rendering is really damn hard, even when trying to simplify the code as much as possible.

It may be of interest to some game/graphics devs here...

[1] https://github.com/texel-org/windfoil-algorithm