Comment by EnPissant
6 months ago
It's important to point out that SDFs compute a pixel distance to the closest edge, while a more traditional font renderer computes pixel coverage. Pixel coverage is optimal. For small fonts, SDFs can look bad in places where edges meet. Maybe this is less of an issue on high PPI displays. Source: I implemented a SDF renderer and it looked worse than freetype.
The coverage/distance distinction isn't relevant - you can trivially compute the coverage in your distance field renderer.
The point about intersections (or hard corners in general) is the issue with distance fields though. You can counteract it a bit by having multiple distance fields and rendering the intersection of them. See e.g. https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen
You don't have the information to compute the coverage. Hard corners is only an issue when scaling up. I am saying they are worse even at 100% scale.