harfbuzz
msdfgen
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harfbuzz | msdfgen | |
---|---|---|
33 | 27 | |
3,572 | 3,699 | |
3.2% | - | |
9.8 | 6.5 | |
7 days ago | 2 days ago | |
C++ | C++ | |
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
harfbuzz
- HarfBuzz: Text Shaping Engine
- Rive Renderer – now open source and available on all platforms
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Libsodium: A modern, portable, easy to use crypto library
For C/C++ projects that use meson as the build system, there is an excellent way to manage dependencies:
https://mesonbuild.com/Wrapdb-projects.html
https://mesonbuild.com/Wrap-dependency-system-manual.html
meson will download and build the libraries automatically and give you a variable which you pass as a regular dependency into the built target:
https://github.com/qemu/qemu/tree/005ad32358f12fe9313a4a0191...
https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/tree/main/subprojects
https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/blob/37457412b3212463c5...
Or, if you're using proper operating systems, they're managed by the usual package manager, just like everything else.
- The Web Assembly Shaper
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Text Rendering Hates You
If you sympathize with the travails of people working on text rendering in applications, please consider supporting (among other projects):
1. The LibreOffice project (libreoffice.org), the free office application suite. This is where the rubber hits the road and developers deal with the extreme complexities of everything regarding text - shaping, styling, multi-object interaction, multi-language, you name it. And - they/we absolutely need donations to manage a project with > 200 million users: https://www.libreoffice.org/donate
2. harfbuzz (https://harfbuzz.github.io), and specifically Behdad Esfahood the main contributor. Although, TBH, I've not quite figured out whether you can donate to that or to him. At least star the project on GitHub I guess.
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ImGui or text rendering libraries
As for text, it depends very heavily on what exactly you need. Simple ASCII text and bitmap fonts? Just do it yourself or get a .bdf parser. Simple Latin/Cyrillic-like writing with ok-looking vector fonts (ttfs)? stb_truetype has all you need. Font hinting, subpixel rendering? You use freetype. More complex writing like Arabic? You will have to do shaping as well, say with HarfBuzz. Need right-to-left or unidirectional text? Hypenation? Go for platform APIs if you can (DirectWrite om Windows, CoreText on Mac).
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QuestPDF: Modern .NET library for PDF document generation
Gold standard? Even though serious bugs are not fixed [1] because "the code is too fragile to touch at this point"? Looks like Android uses HarfBuzz, if so it can't be that bad.
[1] https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/issues/2814
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A Programmable Markup Language for Typesetting [pdf]
The linked libraries are not even close to solving limited subsets of problems solved by FreeType or HarfBuzz. No test is needed if they do not even have a working implementation of particular requisites: Do they work on heterogeneous layouts, directions, languages, locales, scripts, symbols and composites, extensions, variations, legacy, missing, partial or corrupted instructions, standards interpretations, platforms, output devices, nonstandard point structures and grids?
They do not. What they solve is almost a toy problem compared to the size, scope and breadth of these libraries.
Just because some project is implemented in Rust does not make it comparable never mind superior by default.
There is a world out there and it is not homogeneous format and standards-compliant Latin fonts in English LTR text in linear disposition with some generic rectangular subpixel rendering on a regular rectangular grid.
I warmly welcome you to browse closed issues of FreeType [1] and also the closed issues of HarfBuzz [2]. If you feel inspired please do also look into mailing lists and discussion pages related to the development, building, tracking and patching of packages of these projects in any of the numerous places it is used.
The only argument Rust people have is in relation WASM but if you insist in targeting WASM why not fork FreeType, strip it to the strict subset of features your application needs and target it?
Why do it in the first place? Why reinvent the wheel?
As such I will restate my view: I see no gain in using any of these subpar libraries.
[1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/freetype/freetype/-/issues/?s...
[2] https://github.com/harfbuzz/harfbuzz/issues?q=is%3Aclosed
- Harfbuzz 6.0
msdfgen
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Shader Park Is Kinda Neat
This very well explained here https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen and with more details in link d pdf.
Basically, signed distance fields allow high resolution renders from low resolution rasters which represent character shape.
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SDF font rendering & cuttoff parameter value
No idea how to help you but I will just drop this since it improved the quality for me by 1000 https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
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Best approach to render a lot of text.
And that's the complicated state of the art version for 3D perspective. Other versions are even simpler.
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Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS
This is known as a “multi-channel signed distance field”, or “msdf”.
https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
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Font question: What software do you use to create "Signed Distance Field" from OTF or TTF?
I use this, free and has been very good for me https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
- MelonJS – a fresh and lightweight JavaScript game engine
- What is the maximum number of texture2D's I can have in a single texture array uniform binding?
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Why are SDF editors not more popular for creating assets?
Distance fields are not slow to render. They don't need a powerful gpu. Valve was already using SDF for textures in 2007 and released a paper about it. MSDF (multi channel signed distance fields) is a popular text libraries for game engine devs that uses distance fields. Distance fields are fast to render in 2D and even 3D. The problem is with everything around it. Lighting, shadows, shading will all require specialized tooling and likely a specialized engine for very little benefit (imo).
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Vector Graphics on GPU
Signed distance fields only work well for relatively simple characters.
If you have highly detailed characters like Chinese or emojis, you need larger resolution to faithfully represent every detail. One way to get around excessive memory requirements is to store the characters in their default vector forms and only render the required characters on demand, but then you might as well render them at the required pixel resolution and do away with the additional complexity of SDF rendering.
SDFs are still useful though if you have to render text at many different resolutions, for example on signs in computer games, as seen in the original paper https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...
In the past, SDFs also had problems with sharp corners, which has been solved in https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
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Adventures in Text Rendering: Kerning and Glyph Atlases
MSDFGen looks pretty sweet. https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
What are some alternatives?
imgui-sfml - Dear ImGui backend for use with SFML
msdf-atlas-gen - MSDF font atlas generator
nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.
8SSEDT - Tutorial about 8-points Signed Sequential Euclidean Distance Transform
contour - Modern C++ Terminal Emulator
vello - An experimental GPU compute-centric 2D renderer.
c-ares - A C library for asynchronous DNS requests
troika - A JavaScript framework for interactive 3D and 2D visualizations
imgui_sdl - ImGuiSDL: SDL2 based renderer for Dear ImGui
nanovg - Antialiased 2D vector drawing library on top of OpenGL for UI and visualizations.
Tehreer-Android - Standalone text engine for Android aimed to be free from platform limitations
msdfgl - OpenGL implementation of the MSDF algorithm