allsorts VS pathfinder

But again you don't need to reinvent text layout from scratch (that's my discussion, BTW) if you use the platform's native text drawing facilities, like DirectWrite on Windows, or CoreText on macOS.

All these layers of Cows create an extremely complex lifetime tree and it's actually not possible to factor out the complex parsing steps into functions because they depend on a lot of stuff. (trying to return an OutlineBuilder from a function would dangling reference about 3 different temporaries, for example. Obtaining the temporaries is part of the parsing step)

machine learning, neural networks, image processing, cryptography (though it is getting better), font shaping/rendering (though it is getting better), CPU/software rendering (though it is getting better)

It can be used for the things you suggest but our driving use case is font parsing. The goal is to use it to generate the font parsing code in Allsorts, which is ultimately used in Prince.

Use allsorts or rustbuzz for text shaping

Loader -> Allsorts

It's something I'd like to improve on in future -- are there any pure-Rust libraries you'd recommend for shaping? Allsorts looks quite promising.

https://github.com/coconut-xr/apfel-kruemel works today, I only know about battery-optimized software in the context of games though.

https://felt.com/blog/svg-to-canvas-part-2-building-interact... and https://github.com/servo/pathfinder/ might also be of interest.

Parts of Servo to enable the use of the GPU for compositing layers were merged into Firefox years ago.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/10/the-whole-web-at-maximum-f...

It's a shame that Patrick Walton didn't get a chance to finish his work on the Pathfinder GPU renderer.

>Pathfinder 3 is a fast, practical, GPU-based rasterizer for fonts and vector graphics using OpenGL 3.0+, OpenGL ES 3.0+, WebGL 2, and Metal.

https://github.com/servo/pathfinder

You might be interested in https://github.com/servo/pathfinder

It uses too much CPU and performance leaves much to be desired compared to Chromium. They were going to use Pathfinder in Firefox to solve this problem, but since Pathfinder is discontinued due to the massive layoffs at Mozilla, the project was abandoned. And they need a replacement IMO.

I am not an expert in the area, just somebody who read up on it after realizing desktop in VR does not work out for me (and usually low res is not a problem).

I think something like https://github.com/servo/pathfinder (newer) and as you mentioned SDF (older) are the latest approaches.

This is exciting! And, by the way, are you planning to implement something similar to Servo's Pathfinder in Firefox?

Also on my list was pathfinder. There the documented crate is vastly different from https://github.com/servo/pathfinder which looks much more promising – it comes with a few examples, some of wihch might help me get started, maybe?

Have you checked out the Pathfinder library?

https://github.com/servo/pathfinder

Don't forget gpu-based text rendering (e.g. #1, #2, #3). It's still in its infant stages, and seems to be mostly untouched over the past 5 years, but I suspect it will become the preferred method for rendering text later.