Werner, Anuj, Please help me to settle on the SDF format. I know that we discussed it at length early in the days and GRAY16 is more than sufficient. I went searching for *practical* examples on the internet and found very few.This blog post https://blog.mapbox.com/drawing-text-with-signed-distance-fields-in-mapbox-gl-b0933af6f817 and some others refer to OpenGL textures as the next step, Their format is unclear to me but it seems that we should align. The blog post that I mentioned is okay with GRAY8 unevenly split at 192, which brings the question of units too. The units or scale of SDF do not seem to be important.
Should we connect with OpenGL to align on the format? Finally, I am not sure if you realize that FreeType gray coverage antialiased output is conceptually close to a distance field with a "spread" of half-pixel. A straight line passing through a pixel center splits it in half and the coverage of 128 represents the distance of 0. The coverage of 0 and 255 correspond to ± half-pixel distance roughly. So the true distance field essentially makes it possible to interpolate the coverage values over some range of pixel sizes up to the spread value. I wonder if we really need 16 bits for acceptable interpolation. Probably not. What do you think? Alexei
