Kaku

A text rendering crate for rust+wgpu, with the ability to use signed distance fields.

Features

• Rendering of OpenType fonts (loaded with ab_glyph).
• Simple, non-SDF text rendering for performance.
• SDF-based text rendering for high quality upscaling and fast outlining.

What do signed distance fields do?

Without going into details, signed distance fields are a way of representing a shape (such as a character in a font) in a way that allows for high quality upscaling, reducing memory usage. It also allows you to render certain effects such as outlines in a way that is very performant.

While SDF rendering has many benefits, it also takes a little bit longer to generate the textures for each character than with basic texture-based rendering. So this crate provides both methods of text rendering.

Example

Here is a screenshot of the demo example, showing some of the things kaku can do:

This example shows the same text:

• Rendered with no SDF, using just the textures provided by ab_glyph.
• Rendered with SDF.
• Rendered with SDF, with a large outline.
• Rendered with SDF, upscaled 2x. Even though it's upscaled, it's still crisp and smooth!