Comment by Someone
1 day ago
> Can you imagine rewriting a modern web browser engine to use GPU-accelerated text rendering?
It is tricky, but I thought they already (partly) do that. https://keithclark.co.uk/articles/gpu-text-rendering-in-webk... (2014):
“If an element is promoted to the GPU in current versions of Chrome, Safari or Opera then you lose subpixel antialiasing and text is rendered using the greyscale method”
So, what’s missing? Given that comment, at least part of the step from UTF-8 string to bitmap can be done on the GPU, can’t it?
The issue is not subpixel rendering per se (at least if you're willing to go with the GPU compute shader approach, for a pixel-perfect result), it's just that you lose the complex software hinting that TrueType and OpenType fonts have. But then the whole point of rendering fonts on the GPU is to support smooth animation, whereas a software-hinted font is statically "snapped" to the pixel/subpixel grid. The two use cases are inherently incompatible.