msdfgen VS lopdf

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.

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

And that's the complicated state of the art version for 3D perspective. Other versions are even simpler.

This is known as a “multi-channel signed distance field”, or “msdf”.

https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

I use this, free and has been very good for me https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

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).

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

MSDFGen looks pretty sweet. https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

I want to get the text of the first page of a PDF file. I'm using the lopdf crate.

I then came up with the genius idea of exporting the PDF using Inkscape and then just edit the text of the PDF, but using lopdf the text is all stacked ontop of each other. How can I simply convert a SVG to PDF using Rust or change the text of a PDF using Rust?

I copied a lot from lopdf which is a terrific library for PDF parsing. I don't rely on it explicitly as a dependency because there are some things I'm choosing to do differently, but I'd say at least 80% of the parsing logic is the same so it helped me to bootstrap quite a bit.