Re: new release?

[Alexei Podtelezhnikov]

On Sun, May 16, 2021 at 10:10 AM Werner LEMBERG <wl@gnu.org> wrote:
>
>
> > We have already discussed 8 Bit SDF earlier and I agree that 8 Bits
> > is enough for producing acceptable interpolation for rendering. Here
> > is the mail for your reference:
> > https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/freetype-devel/2020-12/msg00042.html
>
> Thanks.
>
> > Back then I was waiting for others opinion and did not add this to
> > the renderers however, if everyone agrees now I'll prepare a patch
> > to remove 16 Bit support and only allow 8 Bit SDF.  It will conserve
> > memory and also eliminate the endiness issue that you mentioned
> > earlier.
>
> Since you and Alexei agree on 8bit being enough: Please change to
> 8bit!

Anuj, thank you for being open minded on this! Regular
FT_PIXEL_MODE_GRAY is very convenient to display in our demo tools.
They can look like extra blurry glyphs in ftview and ftgrid ;) Of
course ftsdf can do cool stuff like interpolations. Again, I propose
normalized SDF with outlide 0 corresponding to −spread and inside 255
corresponding to +spread, rather than 2.6 or 3.5 numbers. This way we
use the entire 8-bit range efficiently and, with spread = 1, it will
look quite similar to our normal rendering. I think your internal
calculations are FT_Fixed and this is just a matter of normalizing
output.