We have created our first image in Vulkan. Now we need to know how to graphically draw text?
Thanks
There are basically 2 ways. The first is to create a texture atlas containing glyph images and render textured boxes for each character. The drawback is that you have to recreate the atlas when you want larger text otherwise it looks awful. You might have noticed that in some web browsers when you zoom in the text looks like crap for a short time. That is because they initially zoom up the small glyphs while generating new larger ones.
The second way, which is much, much better from the typographic quality pov, is to do path rendering directly from an outline font. E.g. a truetype font. The best way I’ve seen for doing this is to draw 2 triangles for each glyph and in the fragment shader fire a ray from the point being rendered, incrementing the winding number each time the ray intersects each contour belonging to the glyph. Whether the number is even or odd will tell you if the point is inside or outside the glyph. You can find a paper describing this technique at http://jcgt.org/published/0006/02/02/ and a library (paid license unfortunately) that implements it at https://sluglibrary.com/
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