Am 07.06.2021 um 03:59 schrieb Bald Eagle:
>> But this turns out to come at the cost of slower render times, and I
>> have a hunch that's because TrueType fonts exclusively use conic (or
>> linear) outline segments, so by adding native support for conic bezier
>> outlines I hope to regain some of the lost performance.

Well, that didn't go as planned...

As it turns out, converting conic-outline fonts straight to 2nd order 
Bezier `prism`s (amended to provide direct support) is actually slower. 
My hunch is that it results in poorer bounding, because elevating the 
order also "tightens" the control points, and I suspect the `prism` 
bounding computations just plain braindeadly bound to the convex hull of 
the control points.
So there might still be potential there, but not the low-hanging fruit I 
was hopong for.

Also, turns out that the loss of performance was just empty prisms I 
created for whitespace characters. Which is of course dumb. Now that 
I've fixed that, rendering of text actually seems to be faster than ever 
before.

> So, it hit me - while trying to get to sleep, of course - that something useful
> would be to have an outline-only version of the text object - that traces out
> the ttf outlines without filling them in like a prism would do.  I know a lot of
> people have played with various font projects, and this would save a lot of work
> in achieving the end-results.
> keyword could be outline_text or text2 or something.

Oh, there's plenty of potential there for such things indeed.

One day, one fine morning, all the spline-related features will be 
combined into one glorious unified system, and text will just be another 
source of splines.

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