SDF Curved Text
canopic jug writes:
Software developer and former computer science student Amit Patel has written a post about generating curved text for maps and other purposes.
Over the last few posts I wrote about things I did to improve font quality, such as antialiasing and combining distance fields to merge outlines and halos. But I want to "pop up the stack" a bit and talk about one of the bigger goals for this project. I want to render text in styles that I've seen in maps, both online and offline, both fantasy and real. In particular, I want to apply spacing, rotation, and curvature to the labels.
[...] These are common in cartography, not only in fantasy maps like Tolkein's but also in real-world maps. Eduard Imhof's classic 1975 paper, Positioning Names on Maps[1] has a ton of great advice on how to position labels, and not only recommends curving text, but also sketches out examples:
In some ways, that desktop computing has moved beyond monospace type comes down to the long term impact of a course in calligraphy and typography which took place decades ago. Now even your GUIs on GNU/Linux or the BSDs provide a variety of typefaces - in straight lines. Text along curved paths is another step forward.
Previously:
(2020) Fonts for Programmers and Developers
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.