[Development] Any plans of supporting Slug text rendering?

[Fatih Uzunoğlu]

Hello,

The Slug algorithm [1] offers a novel approach for rendering text, and 
some see it as being better in all aspects (for modern computers) than 
using SDFs with texture atlas (at least Qt Quick uses this by default).

There is the new curve renderer in Qt Quick since Qt 6.6 
(https://www.qt.io/blog/smooth-vector-graphics-in-qt-quick), but as per 
my understanding it works fundamentally different and can be very heavy 
for simple text rendering, it seems most relevant for complex shape 
rendering (at least for the Latin alphabet, glyphs are very simple).

The algorithm was patented up until very recently, but it is no longer 
the case as per the author, so I think it should be safe for Qt to 
incorporate the algorithm. It also seems to be (similar to SDF) very 
trivial to implement, so it would not take much effort from Qt's side to 
support it.

Going this way would also make multi-channel SDF redundant, if there 
were such plans of using MSDF for rendering text, I think with the Slug 
algorithm it could be abandoned.

Some interesting discussion can be found here: 
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49908962.

[1] https://sluglibrary.com

Best Regards,
Fatih Uzunoğlu