slug-font-rendering

Skill by ara.so — Daily 2026 Skills collection. Slug is a reference implementation of the Slug font rendering algorithm — a GPU-accelerated technique for rendering vector fonts and glyphs at arbitrary scales with high quality anti-aliasing. It works by encoding glyph outlines as lists of quadratic Bézier curves and line segments, then resolving coverage directly in fragment shaders without pre-rasterized textures. Paper: JCGT 2017 — Slug Algorithm Blog (updates): A Decade of Slug License: MIT — Patent dedicated to public domain. Credit required if distributed. Slug is a reference implementation — you integrate the HLSL shaders into your own rendering pipeline. Copy the .hlsl files into your shader directory and include them in your pipeline: You must preprocess font outlines (TrueType/OTF) into Slug's curve buffer format: Each curve entry in the GPU buffer stores: The glyph bounding box is divided into horizontal bands . Each band stores only the curves that intersect it, reducing per-fragment work from O(all curves) to O(local curves).