Discussing Ideas for GPU Accelerated Path/Font Rendering

[ejpbruel]

I have been very interested by the subject of GPU accelerated path/font rendering lately, and my understanding is that this is something that Servo badly needs.

I should point out that I'm still very new to Rust, and Servo in particular, and since path/font rendering is a complicated topic in itself, I doubt I'd be able to implement something like this on my own. Even so, I'd like to try and see if I can help.

I just had short conversation with gw on the #servo irc channel. He said that there are a lot of potential ideas for GPU rendering, and suggested I open an issue here as a central point for discussion. So here we go :-)

[glennw]

cc @pcwalton

[glennw]

http://wdobbie.com/post/gpu-text-rendering-with-vector-textures/ could be an interesting place to start some experiments from.

[ejpbruel]

Another interesting SDF based approach that significantly alleviates the problem of rounded corners is given here:
https://lambdacube3d.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/playing-around-with-font-rendering/

[LifeIsStrange]

There are also a lot of stuff on the chromium doc :
https://github.com/ds-hwang/wiki/wiki/GPU-Font-Rendering

[LifeIsStrange]

Also this :
http://studentarbeten.chalmers.se/publication/176609-fast-text-rendering-on-embedded-gpus

[ruuda]

This presentation about Glyphy is worth watching.

[blissdev]

Saw this today:
https://medium.com/@evanwallace/easy-scalable-text-rendering-on-the-gpu-c3f4d782c5ac#.s1dqbybiu

[LifeIsStrange]

Next libreoffice release will have a text rendering implementation through opengl.

http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LibreOffice-Better-GL-Text

[glennw]

Closing since this doesn't have anything actionable. The links are still useful to keep around, though the work @pcwalton is doing on PF should cover this.