Comment by rudedogg
1 day ago
If I understand correctly, the authors approach doesn't really have this problem since they only upload the glyphs being used to the GPU (at runtime). Yes you still have to pre-compute them for your font, but that should be fine.
but the grandparent post is talking about a browser - how would a browser pre-compute a font, when the fonts are specified by the webpage being loaded?
The most common way this is done is by parsing the font and generating the SDF fields on the fly (usually using Troika - https://github.com/protectwise/troika/blob/main/packages/tro...). It slows down the time to the first render, but it's only a matter of hundreds of ms not seconds, and as part of rendering 3D on webpage no one really expects it to be that fast to start up.
> It slows down the time to the first render
Would caching (domain restricted ofc) not trivially fix that? I don't expect a given website to use very many fonts or that they would change frequently.
webassembly hosting freetype in a webworker. not too difficult.