clipka <ano### [at] anonymousorg> wrote:

> As a matter of fact, fonts is exactly the topic I'm implementing this
> for in the first place, because I'm working on throwing out our
> dedicated `text` shape rendering code and replacing it with `prism`
> under the hood.

Very nice.  I recall that was one of the things on your list.  Maybe the visual
quality of the fonts will improve with the new implementation.

> And yes, so far I have been using degree-elevation to map conic outlines
> to cubic ones as already supported by `prism`.

Of course you have.  :D
Your toolbox of coding stuff must be astonishing to behold.

> 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.

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.

I don't know if daisy-chaining the spline with a sphere sweep would be the way
to go, or maybe if there's some way to take the font segment data and make it
visible to the SDL in the form of an array or something.  I've seen some very
nice technical drawings when I was researching working with the splines and font
data, and I think that such a an additional low-level tool would be attractive
to folks who work with typefaces and might want to make technical drawings,
presentations explaining how fonts are drawn, etc.
http://www.mathisintheair.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/G-45-90_5373.gif

It would also be a very nice way to have the font data at one's fingertips in
case a user wanted to make small edits to the coordinates, or anything else
requiring the actual font data.


I'm not sure how much of your work would cross over into making SVG a useable
format, but maybe that's something to keep in mind and at least plop a juicy
comment into the source code.  ;)

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