glyphy VS Fly-Pie

harfbuzz creator made https://github.com/behdad/glyphy/ which i integrated into GTK a while back (but we don't ship currently, because we still do the bitmap stuff).

the bitmap stuff still has major drawbacks though, like maintaining grid alignments and pixel boundaries where as this stuff (mostly) goes away using glyphy.

still work to be done around hinting though (hence not merged).

You can approximate the Bézier curves with circular arcs and store those in the "SDF" instead. https://github.com/behdad/glyphy

> The only issue with it is that font rendering looks horrific, but that might just be my machine.

This is because GTK4 enables pixel/scaling-independent fractional vertical positioning, even with hinting enabled. There's a long (somewhat ongoing) discussion at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/3787, though I haven't followed the last few months of discussion.

Even though GTK4 aims to achieve scale-independent layout, the 4 horizontal/vertical positions still produce a bit of judder, and fonts do not scale smoothly (even with bilinear interpolation) with hinting enabled, and (unless fixed) there are rendering issues due to failing to clear the texture atlas properly: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/4322

Interestingly there's a proposal to switch GTK4 fonts to SDF-style rendering. This is somewhat like what Qt Quick 2 implemented already (and KDE turns off and reverts to FreeType rendering, to make QML apps mimic Qt Widgets font rendering more): https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2022/03/20/rendering-text-w... However, I looked at https://github.com/behdad/glyphy and it seems to implement vector-based SDFs, instead of earlier texture-based SDF/MSDFs used by Valve games and Qt Quick.

By the way, I found this extension called Fly-Pie that really reminds me of android. This youtuber happened to talk about how gnome extensions tend to break. From my minimal search today and yesterday, I did see a lot of them are unsupported. Do you agree with what the youtuber said?

The awesome community feedback I have received for Fly-Pie has been the main motivation to start this new project.

This release brings better multi-monitor support, better multi-cursor support, and the option to show tiny labels on each item. For a complete list of changes, you can read the changelog!

I posted some ways to get in contact here. And yes, there are plenty of matrix channels where the GNOME devs hang around.

Fly-Pie gets ported to KDE Plasma as a feature or simply a downloadable package/flatpak

Star the repository: https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie

Something like this perhaps: https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie? Only works with gnome.

One of my other extensions: Fly-Pie