Fast and Approximate Text Rendering Using Distance Fields

Abstract: Distance field text rendering has many advantages compared to most other text renderingsolutions. Two of the advantages are the possibility  to scale the glyphs without losing the crisp edge and less memory consumption. A drawback with distance field text renderingcan be high distance field generation time. The solution for fast distance field text renderingin this thesis generates the distance fields by drawing distance gradients locally over the outlines of the glyphs. This method is much faster than the old exact methods for generating distance fields that often includes multiple passes over the whole image. Using the solution for text rendering proposed in this thesis results in good looking text that is generated on the fly. The distance fields are generated on a mobile device in less than 10 ms for most of the glyphs in good quality which is less than the time between two frames.