When used for font rendering, signed distance fields are best understood as a *compression* technique, not a rendering algorithm at all.
-
-
Replying to @pcwalton
Why is that? They represent/yield something very different than anything you can get with ordinary raster textures.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @RichFelker
They scale up to about 4x the texture size, then they usually become unacceptably distorted. So comparison is between SDF vs. 4x raster.
1 reply 1 retweet 1 like -
Replying to @pcwalton @RichFelker
If you’re OK with the distortion above ~4x, then SDFs can be useful. But if you have hard quality bounds, then they’re just compression.
1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @pcwalton
The way they distort is certainly different (and much less awful) than raster scaling. A while back I saw an improvement on SDF that did better still.
2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
(Probably thinking of msdfgen.) Not disagreeing with that, just saying that *if you have hard quality bounds* then they’re compression.
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.