| ▲ | torginus 4 hours ago | |
I haven't heard of Chlumský or MSDF before, but I think a lot of people have been aware of the technique before he published his paper, thanks to Valve's TF2 text rendering paper: https://web.archive.org/web/20120505013814/https://www.valve... The pdf details only simple SDF, but in the closing paragraphs, it mentions the weakness of the technique and mentions how it can be solved with multiple SDFs, but the exact technique wasn't showcased. Which led to people trying to reverse engineering it, and making their implementation, for years (it's Valve after all). Including me. Not sure if what I came up with was exactly MSDF, but certainly there are a lot of implementations out there. | ||
| ▲ | rezmason 3 hours ago | parent [-] | |
We mostly agree! I should elaborate. I'd say what you and the others did was research, not implementation. Your results were solutions to the same problem, not variations of the same recipe. What you did is important but separate from what's concerned me. A recipe of Chlumský's— the msdfgen utility— is widely used, but only has one producer. I'm just saying that that's a liability. Like, imagine if HarfBuzz was the only text shaper, and was maintained by one person. | ||