Chlumsky

msdfgen

C++2019–2026

Chlumsky / msdfgen

msdfgen

Multi-channel signed distance field generator

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Multi-channel signed distance field generator

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

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Observed mentions: 2019-05-27 09:28:07 UTC to 2026-06-12 04:03:17 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	1	2
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	0	5
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	0	3
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

17 sources

bel8·Jun 12, 2026

I had a similar experience with DeepSeek Flash. I'm developing a webgl game in TypeScript using my little custom vibesloped game engine that runs in the browser and live reloads whenever a file is saved. I told the LLM to implement Multi-channel Signed Distance Field font rendering to have crisp text on all zoom levels. That was the prompt, which is not what I usually do but I "was feeling lucky and lazy". After 10 minutes it had: - Installed msdf_gen library (great library btw https://github.com/chlumsky/msdfgen) - Created a CLI tool to convert TTF to SDF JSON/XML - Ran the tool, did smoke tests on the resulting SDF data and fixed the tool until the font file looked good - Created a new Scene in the game to test MSDF fonts And here's what I found impressive: DeepSkeep doesn't have vision capabilities and there's no DOM HTML in a WebGL ga

Read the rest

me. So the LLM is completely blind here. It then proceeded to state that it could not "see" the result but would try to test it anyway. It then started creating and sending huge one line javascript to the browser console, trying to gather game state data that could be useful to understand if any font was being rendered. It couldn't gather much so it decided to simplify the font scene to renter a single dot and started sending custom JS code again, this time with gl.readPixels(). It basically bisected the webgl canvas reading pixels in a divide an conquer pattern. Once it saw that the dozens of pixels gathered where probably resembling of a dot, it then changed the game code to render a dash and repeated the gl.readPixels() calls by sending more custom JS to the browser. There were many console errors during all this saga but it kept fixing and sending again. The result was a bit blurry. There was a shader bug in the code it created. It managed to fix after I told it looked blurry, despite still being blind. The best part is that the whole thing cost me $0.10. Now I'm doing tests with MiMo 2.5 (non Pro) which has vision capabilities, similar pricing and comparable performance to DeepSeek Flash.

In Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive

talkingtab·Nov 11, 2025

MSDF is worth looking at: https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen and https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007... The context is GPU's, things like three.js But yes, drawing text is hard.

In Drawing Text Isn't Simple: Benchmarking Console vs. Graphical Rendering

talkingtab·Aug 4, 2025

A very good example of SDF thinking, using signed distance fields in shaders. Both shaders and SDF are new to me and very interesting. Another example of what is being done is MSDF here: https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen.

In Perfecting anti-aliasing on signed distance functions

account42·Jun 13, 2025

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

In Rendering Crispy Text on the GPU

febusravenga·Dec 11, 2023

This very well explained here https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen and with more details in linked pdfs. Basically, signed distance fields allow high resolution renders from low resolution rasters which represent character shape. It's used by many web font rendering libraries esp for maps

In Shader Park Is Kinda Neat

FrostKiwi·Jul 21, 2023

Super big fan of SDF text rendering and their ability to get effects like soft-shadows and hard bevels, essentially for free by baking Multi Channel and Single SDFs into one RGBA texture.[1] was surprised to see emojis work without being decomposed into separate parts, albeit the colors losing their sharpness above the texture's 1:1 resolution. [1] https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

In Sub-pixel distance transform

dorkwood·Mar 9, 2023

> KiCad uses a technique using RGB for gradients so that the rendered glyphs can be anti-aliased without accidentally rounding sharp corners. This is known as a “multi-channel signed distance field”, or “msdf”. https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

In Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS

dorkwood·Dec 21, 2022

Look into msdf rendering for text in WebGL. https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

In MelonJS – a fresh and lightweight JavaScript game engine

johndough·Aug 10, 2022

> It only works for moderate scaling up before looking bad That problem has been solved by multi-channel signed distance fields https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

In Vector graphics on GPU

jstimpfle·Aug 10, 2022

What I was referring is SDFs/MSDFs as in https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen . Of course you can implement smooth circles directly in a shader the way you describe, but note that there are Vector outline shapes that are not circles... Check out the outlines you can do using SVG - paths composed of straight line segments as well as cubic bezier curves and various arcs. Also color gradients, stroking...

In Vector graphics on GPU

dubiousconst281·Jul 28, 2022

I wonder how signed distance fields performs in practice. Seems like it would fix, or at least minimize the scaling/offset issues quite nicely. https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

In Adventures in Text Rendering: Kerning and Glyph Atlases

jimmySixDOF·Feb 14, 2022

Not sure if your game has any spatial 3D consideration but this project uses real time Multi-channel signed distance field generation : [1] https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

In Text Rendering Hates You (2019)

pvidler·Mar 15, 2021

You can always render the text to a texture offline as a signed distance field and just draw out quads as needed at render time. This will always be faster than drawing from the curves, and rendering from an SDF (especially multi-channel variants) scales surprisingly well if you choose the texture/glyph size well. A little more info: https://blog.mapbox.com/drawing-text-with-signed-distance-fi... MIT-licensed open-source multi-channel glyph generation: https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen The only remaining issue would be the kerning/layout, which is admittedly far from simple.

In 2D Graphics on Modern GPU (2019)

srgpqt·Mar 16, 2020

msdfgen : https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen

In Getting started with shaders: signed distance functions

jchw·Jul 19, 2019

I do recall somewhat recently a great improvement was made to SDF using multiple channels of information: https://github.com/Chlumsky/msdfgen I wonder how they both compare. I am guessing Slug is more accurate but certainly also much more intensive, if its actually rendering outlines.

In Slug: Dynamic GPU Font Rendering and Advanced Text Layout

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